73 Tech Predictions Will Make You Laugh
In 1995 Newsweek predicted that Internet will fail: “No online database will replace your daily newspaper.”
“Any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous.” — James Dater
I love skeptical predictions. So I made the ultimate list of quotes told to inventors and entrepreneurs about their projects throughout our history.
It feels like an SNL sketch.
1486
“So many centuries after the Creation it is unlikely that anyone could find hitherto unknown lands of any value.” — The committee advising King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain regarding a proposal by Christopher Columbus.
1492
“Printed books will never be the equivalent of handwritten codices, especially since printed books are often deficient in spelling and appearance.” — Johannes Trithemius, abbot and a polymath.
1803
“There are <…> a crowd of adventurers and men with plans who roam the world, offering to every sovereign their so-called discoveries which only exist in their imaginations. They’re no more than charlatans or imposters, who have no other goal except to grab money.” — Napoleone Bonaparte about Robert Fulton, inventor of the steamboat.
1825
“What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?” — The Quarterly Review.
1830
“The canal system of this country is being threatened by a new form of transportation known as ‘railroads’ … <…> ‘railroad’ carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles per hour by ‘engines’ which, in addition to endangering life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside, setting fire to 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, Governor of New York.
“Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.” — Dr. Dionysius Lardner, popularizer of science.
1859
“Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.” — Associates of Col. Edwin Drake.
1864
“No one will pay good money to get from Berlin to Potsdam in one hour when he can ride his horse there in one day for free.” — King William I of Prussia, on trains.
1865
“Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires as may be done with dots and dashes of Morse code, and that, were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.” — Unidentified Boston newspaper.
1872
“Theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.” — Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology.
1873
“The abdomen, the chest and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon,” — Sir John Eric Erichsen, a British doctor appointed Surgeon Extraordinary to Queen Victoria.
1876
“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.” — William Preece, British Post Office.
“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.” — William Orton, President of Western Union.
1878
“When the Paris Exhibition [of 1878] closes, electric light will close with it and no more will be heard of it.” — Oxford professor Erasmus Wilson.
1880
“Everyone acquainted with the subject will recognize it as a conspicuous failure.” — Henry Morton, president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, on Edison’s light bulb.
1888
“The electric light has no future.” — Professor John Henry Pepper.
1888
“We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.” — Simon Newcomb, Canadian-born American astronomer.
1889
“Fooling around with alternating current (AC) is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever.” — Thomas Edison, inventor and businessman.
1895
“It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the (flying machine) problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere.” — Thomas Edison, inventor and businessman.
“Heavier than air flying machines are impossible.” — Lord Kelvin, President of British Royal Society.
1898
“Don’t waste time on foolish ideas. Radio has no future, X-rays are clearly a hoax, and the aeroplane is scientifically impossible.” — Lord Kelvin, President of British Royal Society.
1899
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.” — Charles H. Duell, commissioner to the U.S. Office of Patents.
1880s
“The phonograph has no commercial value at all.” — Thomas Edison, inventor and businessman.
1901
“I am tired of all this sort of thing called science here… We have spent millions in that sort of thing for the last few years, and it is time it should be stopped.” — Simon Cameron, US Senator.
1901
“I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.” — HG Wells, British novelist.
1902
“Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.” — Simon Newcomb, Canadian–American astronomer.
1903
“The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty — a fad.” — President of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Company.
1903
“Hence, if it requires, say, a thousand years to fit for easy flight a bird which started with rudimentary wings, or ten thousand for one which started with no wings at all and had to sprout them ab initio, it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years.” — The New York Times.
1905
“It is complete nonsense to believe flying machines will ever work. ”— Sir Stanley Mosley.
1907
“The aeroplane will never fly.” — Lord Haldane.
1909
“That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.” — Scientific American.
1911
“Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.” — Marechal Ferdinand Foch, French general.
1913
“Lee DeForest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public … has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company …” — a U.S. District Attorney, prosecuting American inventor Lee DeForest for selling stock fraudulently through the mail for his Radio Telephone Company.
1916
“The idea that cavalry will be replaced by these iron coaches is absurd. It is little short of treasonous.” — comment of Aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Haig, at tank demonstration.
1920
“No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris.” — Orville Wright, inventor of the airplane.
1921
“The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?” — Associates of David Sarnoff responding to the latter’s call for investment in the radio.
1922
“The radio craze will die out in time.” — Thomas Edison, inventor and businessman.
1926
“While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility.” — Lee DeForest, American inventor.
1927
“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” — H. M. Warner, Warner Brothers.
1928
“Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of it.” — C.P. Scott, Editor, Manchester Guardian.
1930
“No “scientific bad boy” ever will be able to blow up the world by releasing atomic energy.” — Robert Millikan, American physicist and Nobel Prize winner.
1932
“There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” — Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist.
1933
“There will never be a bigger plane built.” — A Boeing engineer, after the first flight of the 247, a twin-engine plane that holds ten people.
1936
“A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.” — New York Times.
1946
“Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” — Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox.
1957
“I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked to the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.” — Editor, Prentice Hall Books.
1957
“To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth — all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances.” — Lee De Forest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube.
1957
“Space travel is bunk.” — Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Astronomer Royal of the UK.
1959
“The world potential market for copying machines is 5000 at most.”— IBM, to the founders of Xerox.
1961
“There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television or radio service inside the United States.” — T.A.M. Craven, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner.
1966
“Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop.” — Time Magazine.
1968
“With over fifteen types of foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn’t likely to carve out a big share of the market for itself.” — Business Week.
1968
“But what … is it good for?” — Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM commenting on the microchip.
1977
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” — Ken Olsen, President of Digital Equipment Corporation.
1981
“Cellular phones will absolutely not replace local wire systems.” — Marty Cooper, inventor.
1985
“But the real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets. Because no matter how inexpensive the machines become, and no matter how sophisticated their software, I still can’t imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing.” — Erik Sandberg-Diment, New York Times software columnist.
1989
“We will never make a 32-bit operating system.” — Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft.
1980
“No one will ever buy your stuff on CD” — unnamed EMI executive.
1992
“The idea of a personal communicator in every pocket is a “pipe dream driven by greed.” — Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel Corporation.
1995
“The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.” — Clifford Stoll, Newsweek.
1998
“By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”— Professor Paul Krugman.
2005
“There’s just not that many videos I want to watch.” — Steve Chen, CTO and co-founder of YouTube expressing concerns about his company’s long-term viability.
2005
“This website venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable. ”— Nikk Finke in LA Weekly regarding HuffPost.
2005
“Next Christmas the iPod will be dead, finished, gone, kaput” — Sir Alan Sugar, British entrepreneur.
2006
“Everyone’s always asking me when Apple will come out with a cell phone. My answer is, ‘Probably never.’” — David Pogue, The New York Times.
2007
“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” — Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO.
“Apparently none of you guys realize how bad of an idea a touchscreen is on a phone. I foresee some pretty obvious and pretty major problems here.” — Reddit user.
2008
“Let’s look at the facts. Nobody uses those things” — Steve Ballmer about apps.
2013
“In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore.” — Thorsten Heins, BlackBerry CEO.
2013
“The Bitcoin dream is all but dead.” — Kevin Roose, writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine.
2017
“Bitcoin is a fraud. It’s worse than tulip bulbs. It won’t end well.” — Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase.
“The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.” — John F. Kennedy, U.S. President.
If you have an interesting quote to add, just leave a comment.
I’ve excluded some quotes with no evidence to be really said. Please tell me if your fact-checking proves that quote is misleading.
Nik Mcfly
Lead Community Manager at McFly.aero — Air Taxi Incubator
