All -Time Awesomely Failed Tech Predictions

Some people think they know everything, and it’s usually those people who have to eat their ridiculous statements a few years later.

1. “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” — Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, maker of big business mainframe computers, arguing against the PC in 1977.

2. “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 in 1913.

3. “We will never make a 32 bit operating system.” — Bill Gates. He also once comically stated in a Focus magazine interview that "there are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed." Ha! But here’s one of his failed predictions that we actually wish he had gotten right: in 2004 he told the BBC that, "spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time." Three years later spam is alive and well and poised to outlast Web 2.

4. “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. Craven, FCC Commissioner, in 1961 (the first commercial communications satellite went into service in 1965).

5. “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 DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, in 1926

6. “A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.” — New York Times, 1936.

7. “Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical (sic) and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.” - Simon Newcomb; The Wright Brothers flew at Kittyhawk 18 months later.

8. “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” — Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society, 1895.

9. “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.

10. “Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality in 10 years.” -– Alex Lewyt, president of vacuum cleaner company Lewyt Corp., in the New York Times in 1955.

Personally I most enjoy laughing at the people who claim X will never come to pass, because with the ones saying X WILL come to pass—you can’t really fault them for dreaming. After all, most of the technology we do have came from someone “crazy” enough to attempt something “impossible”.

Posted by Rebecca Sato

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Source:
http://listverse.com/history/top-30-failed-technology-predictions/

http://www.astrodigital.org/digital/billgates.html