"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
- Bill Gates, CEO and founder of Microsoft and world's wealthiest man, 1981
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), maker of big business mainframe computers, arguing against the PC, 1977
"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, 1961
(the first commercial communications satellite went into service in 1965)
"Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition."
- Dennis Gabor, British physicist and author of Inventing the Future, 1962
"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year."
- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957
"Space travel is bunk."
- Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Astronomer Royal of the UK, 1957
(two weeks later Sputnik orbited the Earth)
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
- Popular Mechanics, "predicting" the relentless march of technology, 1949
"Television won't last. It's a flash in the pan."
- Mary Somerville, pioneer of radio educational broadcasts, 1948
"... too far-fetched to be considered."
- Editor of Scientific American, in a letter to Robert Goddard about Goddard's
idea of a rocket-accelerated airplane bomb, 1940
(German V2 missiles came down on London 3 years later)
"A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth's atmosphere."
- New York Times, 1936
"The energy produced by the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine."
- Ernst Rutherford, New Zealand physicist, 1933
"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean the atom would have to be shattered at will."
- Albert Einstein, German-born American physicist, 1932
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
- H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, maker of silent movies, 1927
"The radio craze will die out in time."
- Thomas Edison, American inventor, 1922
"Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."
- New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work, 1921
(note that the day after Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969, the New York
Times printed a short boxed item on page 2. It read in full:
"Errata: It has now been conclusively demonstrated that a rocket ship can
travel through the vacuum of space. The Times sincerely regrets the error.")
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
- David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in radio, 1920s
"I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions."
- Wilbur Wright, American aviation pioneer, speech to the Aero Club of France, 1908
"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value."
- Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre, 1904(?)
"X-rays will prove to be a hoax."
- Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society, 1895(?)
"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."
- Albert. A. Michelson, German-born American physicist, 1894
"We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy."
- Simon Newcomb, Canadian-born American astronomer, 1888
"The phonograph has no commercial value at all."
- Thomas Edison, American inventor, 1880s
"The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon".
- Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon Extraordinary to
Queen Victoria, 1873
"Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction."
- Pierre Pachet, British surgeon, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872
"A man has been arrested in New York for attempting to extort funds from ignorant and superstitious people by exhibiting a device which he says will convey the human voice any distance over metallic wires so that it will be heard by the listener at the other end. He calls this instrument a telephone. Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires."
- News item in a New York newspaper, 1868
"What, sir, would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I pray you, excuse me, I have not the time to listen to such nonsense."
- Napoleon Bonaparte, when told of Robert Fulton's steamboat, 1800s
