Worst Predictions Ever

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by frau kaleun

"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

"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, 1880

"The phonograph has no commercial value at all." - Thomas Edison, American inventor, 1880s

"Very interesting, Whittle, my boy, but it will never work." - Cambridge Aeronautics Professor, when shown Frank Whittle's plan for the jet engine

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

"The Americans are good about making fancy cars and refrigerators, but that doesn't mean they are any good at making aircraft. They are bluffing. They are excellent at bluffing."
-Hermann Goering

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
Charles H. Duell, an official at the US patent office, 1899.

"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, in 1901.

"A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth's atmosphere."
New York Times, 1936

"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

"That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done [research on]... The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives."
Admiral William D. Leahy, U.S. Admiral working in the U.S. Atomic Bomb Project, advising President Truman on atomic weaponry, 1944.

"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, 1932.

-If he got that one wrong just maybe... naw...