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Раз пошла такая пьянка... "The end of the world will surely come
in eighteen hundred and eighty one."
- Mother Shipton, English prophet, c.1600.
"To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin." - Cardinal Bellarmine, on Galileo's trial, 1615.
"One day there will be a telephone in every major city in the USA" - Alexander Graham Bell, c.1880.
"The telephone may be appropriate for our American cousins, but not here, because we have an adequate supply of messenger boys." - group of British experts, c.1900.
"[By 2000] every river or creek with any suitable fall will be equipped with water motors, turning dynamos, making electricity" - John Elfreth Watkins, Jnr, Ladies' Home Journal, 1900.
Electricity transmission by wireless may be commercially feasible - Scientific American, 1920.
"I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning." - J Rayleigh, leading British physicist, 1896.
"Aircraft are interesting toys, but of no military value." - Marshal Foch, France, 1912.
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" - Associates of David Sarnoff, manager of an early US radio network, 1920s.
"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossiblity, a development on which we need waste little time dreaming." - Lee de Forest, "father of radio", 1926.
"Television won't be able to hold onto any market it captures after the first six mmonths. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." - Darryl F Zanuck, 1946.
"An automaton may be contrived that will have its 'own mind'." - Nikolai Tesla, 1900.
"I think there is a world market for as many as 5 computers." - Thomas Watson, head of IBM,1943.
Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons - Popular Mechanics, 1949.
"I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." - Editor of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977 (who was wrong, even then, as the first Apple was already available. Maybe he had a very narrow idea of what people did at home.)
"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be available. It would mean the atom would have to be shattered at will." - Alfred Einstein, physicist, 1932.
Some predictions from Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener's 1967 book The Year 2000:
100 Technical Innovations Very Likely in the Last Third of the 20th Century:
"Human hibernation for relatively extensive periods (months to years)."
"Physically nonharmful methods of overindulging." [in the movie, Dr Strangelove was a caricature of Herman Kahn.]
"Artificial moons...for lighting large areas at night."
"Stimulated and planned and perhaps programmed dreams."
(About 50 of the 100 predictions were more or less correct.)
The first American demonstration of the videophone was on 14 November 1920, when pictures were wired between New York and St Louis. In 1975, Telecom Australia predicted up to 200,000 videophones in Australia by 2000. The actual figure: about 50. See "On the persistence of lackluster demand - the history of the video telephone" - Steven Schnaars and Cliff Wymbs, in Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2004, vol. 71, pages 197-216.
"The 'death ray' for destroying aircraft is a potentially valuable weapon" - Lt Cmdr Fitzhugh Green, US Navy, 1924.
In December 1938, Lloyds of London was offering odds of 32 to 1 that there would be no war in the following year. In 1939, World War II began.
"Before the twentieth century closes, the earth will be purged of its foulest shame, the killing of men in battle under the name of war." - Andrew Carnegie.
"The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty." - President of Michigan Savings Bank, 1903, advising Henry Ford's lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Company.
Checking the links to this page, I found an interesting comment on this prediction at theroblog.blogspot.com - "could well have been true for the distance into the future the author might have been speaking of (e.g. 10 years from 1902)". This raises the interesting idea that if I make a prediction for 10 years ahead, it could be be very different from the prediction I make for 100 years ahead.
[When cars are in general use] "we shall probably find public taste changing so that many people will prefer to travel from place to place more slowly than at present" - Cleveland Moffet, USA, 1900.
[By 2000,] "the automobile will have driven out the horse... The trip from suburban home to office will require a few minutes only." - J E Watkins again, 1900.
"The actual building of roads devoted to motor cars is not for the near future, in spite of many rumors to that effect." - Harper's Weekly,, USA, August 2, 1902.
" "Automobiles will start to decline as soon as the last shot is fired in World War 2. Instead of a car in every garage, there will be a helicopter." - Harry Bruno, aviation publicist, 1943.
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