“Landing and moving about on the moon offers so many serious problems for
human beings that it may take science another 200 years to lick them.”
— Science Digest, 1948
“You’ll never make it — four groups are out.”
— Anonymous record company executive to the Beatles, 1962
“While theoretically and technically television may be feasible,
commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development
of which we need waste little time dreaming.”
— Lee De Forest, 1926
“Television won’t matter in your lifetime or mine.”
— R.S. Lambert, Canadian Broadcaster, 1936
[Hey, give him credit: he was right!]
“The actual building of roads devoted to motor cars is not
for the near future, in spite of many rumours to that effect.”
— Harper’s Weekly, 1902
“The ordinary ‘horseless carriage’ is at present a luxury for the wealthy;
and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of
course, come into as common use as the bicycle.”
— Literary Digest, 1899
“Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to
breathe, would die of asphyxia.”
— Dr. Dionysus Lardner, 1793-1859
“What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of
locomotives travelling twice the speed of stagecoaches?”
— Quarterly Review, 1825
“Railroad Carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 mph by engines
which, in addition to endangering life and limb of passengers, roar and
snort their way through the countryside, setting fire to the crops,
scaring the livestock, and frightening women and children. The Almighty
certainly never intended that people should travel at such breakneck
speed.”
— Martin Van Buren
“Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth decimal place.”
— A. A. Michelson, 1894
[On the occasion of the dedication of a physics laboratory in Chicago,
noting that all the more important physical laws had been discovered]
“I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the
existence of atoms and other such dogmas.”
— Ernst Mach (1838-1916)
“Physics, as we know it, will be over in six months.” — Max Born, 1928
“Even originally well-defined pencils of cathode rays from the Sun cannot
reach the Earth. For Birkeland’s theories to be correct, the existance of
such cathode rays is clearly presupposed to be necessary...and this
assumption is untenable.”
— Arthur Schuster, on Kristian Birkeland’s theory of what causes
aurorae. The “cathode rays” are now called the solar wind.
“It seems as if we may also be forced to conclude that the supposed
connexion between magnetic storms and sun-spots is unreal, and that the
seeming agreement between periods has been a mere coincidence.”
— Lord Kelvin, 1892
“X-rays will prove to be a hoax.”
— Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895
“Radio has no future.”
— Lord Kelvin
“Heavier than air flying machines are impossible.”
— Lord Kelvin
“Flight by machines heavier than air is impractical and insignificant, if
not utterly impossible.”
— Simon Newcomb, Director, U.S. Naval Observatory, 1902
““It seems as if we may also be forced to conclude that the supposed
connexion between magnetic storms and sun-spots is unreal, and that the
seeming agreement between periods has been a mere coincidence.”
— Lord Kelvin, 1892
“X-rays will prove to be a hoax.”
— Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895
“Radio has no future.”
— Lord Kelvin
“Heavier than air flying machines are impossible.”
— Lord Kelvin”
Man, that Lord Kelvin had a nose for history and scientific development. If alive today I’m sure he’d say of the internet “It’s only a mild distraction. There is no way people will substitute going out and seeing the world for simply bringing the world to them” and of digital technology “Sure, it may be the best way of transmitting information efficiently ever designed but who needs that much info that fast and in so many different places? Waste of resources.”