Read on Twitter
The next time you find yourself blindly following “the experts,” remember this thread...
“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
“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” – Decca Recording Company on declining to sign the Beatles, 1962
“This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” – Western Union internal memo, 1876
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” – Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
“X-rays will prove to be a hoax.” – Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1883
“The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad.” – The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903
“Television won’t last because people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” – Darryl Zanuck, movie producer, 20th Century Fox, 1946
“If excessive smoking actually plays a role in the production of lung cancer, it seems to be a minor one.” – W.C. Heuper, National Cancer Institute, 1954
“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
“The world potential market for copying machines is 5,000 at most.” – IBM to the eventual founders of Xerox, saying that the photocopier had no market large enough to justify production, 1959
“It’ll be gone by June.” – Variety Magazine on Rock n’ Roll music, 1955
“A rocket will never leave Earth’s atmosphere.” – New York Times, 1936
“A survey from the Princeton Election Consortium has found that Hillary Clinton has a 99 per cent chance of winning the election over Donald Trump.” The Independent, Nov 5, 2016
In 1899, Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of the US Office of Patents astutely noted that “everything that can be invented has been invented.” Since then, 7,673,820 inventors have received patents from the USPTO.
In 1929, 3 days before the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression, Economist Irving Fisher made the prediction that “stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Days later, investors across the globe would lose trillions.
In 1981, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft prophesied the maximum speed of computers with his opinion that “640K ought to be enough for anybody.” Today, the average personal computer is 300,000,000 times faster than that.
In 2007, Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft proclaimed that: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” Since 2007, Apple has sold almost 430 million iPhone. Microsoft has only sold about 2% of that number.
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers predicted that if Donald Trump were elected, there would be a protracted recession within 18 months.
