Inventions they said would never work | Hacker News Reader

Inventions they said would never work

null-hypothesis.co.uk

32 pointsjflowers4531 comments

I am tired of all this thing called science.... We have spent millions in that sort of thing for the last few years, and it is time it should be stopped.

- Simon Cameron, U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, 1861

With the Intelligent Design debate, one could see this quote coming from a representative in this century.

The Internet will catastrophically collapse in 1996.’ - Robert Metcalfe, internet inventor

Perhaps he was talking about the Eternal September?

Yes. The Internet of yore collapsed in a singularity caused by the excessive concentration of cluelessness. We are all presently living inside this event horizon.

Well, Popular Mechanics was technically right. I am writing this on a computer that weighs no more than 1.5 tons. Quite a bit less in fact.

Lord Kelvin should probably have kept his mouth shut.

Almost all of this stuff is taken out of context. Almost all of them are statements about immediate practicality, not predictions of the future. When Kelvin said that, there wasn't even a hint of an engine that could actually power an airplane. He was basically right: in the middle of the 19th century, the Wright brothers would have failed to produce an airplane.

Likewise the Western Union quote about the telephone. The devices demonstrated in 1878 really were primitive, and competed very poorly with telegrams for rapid communication.

But yeah, it's all funny.

Agreed. When they were doing the re-creation of the Wright Flyer for its anniversary flight recently I was quite taken by just how primitive the engine was and how much mass there was just to get a few HP. The advancement in engine power to weight ratios over the next forty years is absolutely amazing if you consider how slowly things have moved for the previous hundred years.

Though in some cases he may have been in error, I disagree:

http://zapatopi.net/kelvin/quotes/

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 F. Zanuck, Head of 20th Century-Fox, 1946.

How I wish you were right, my dear Darryl.

Oh, but he was right! People prefer plastic boxes now. Plywood isn't nearly as fashionable.

More seriously, though, I'm pretty sure I know people who did 'get bored' of TV, so it's probably more of a personal choice...

Yeah, i was bored with it, but only after years of brain melting. If you watch TV for 6+ hours a day for 6 years you will get bored eventually. The numbers are approximate, but close in my case, i don't know how i survived 6 years of cartoon network. And its nice to see that Einstein was wrong for something, makes him more human.

Many things make Einstein more human. You should hear the story about his first wife, Mileva Maric. Quite a sad ordeal.

Where is the infamous "640KB ought to be enough..."?

I'd also add Edison rejecting alternating current for powering cities, although can't find explicit quotes about it.

This has someting to do with there being no record of him (Bill Gates) ever saying that: http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484

I hate to say it, but this sort of reminds me of the comments here when someone proudly posts their brand new website.

The machine gun is a much overrated weapon; two per battalion is more than sufficient.

If you're talking heavy machine guns, and non-mechanized battalions, then this is probably about right.

Now you know why Haig is called "The Butcher of the Somme." IIRC, the fool( a Field Marshall at that) ordered thousands to their death at the hands of just 2 German machine guns. 20,000 British soldiers died that day, a record for he Brits. Poor bastards...

Most light infantry platoons carry at least one GPMG (general purpose machine gun).

Generally, heavy machine guns usually mean vehicle mounted, which isn't something that would be employed at all by early 20th century infantry. (No vehicles back then)

Thanks for posting this. I've been trying to track down that quote about rail travel and asphyxia (by Dr. Dionysus Lardner) for ages...

The way we suck at predicting the future is terrifying and even kind of insulting to humankind.

I don't know - there's probably an equally large number of predictions which turned out to be right. They're just not mentioned on this list.

Ok, but that doesn't make us good predictors. It is especially frustrating to see renowned people being actually so narrow-minded in some respects.

Yeah, I'd agree - but making predictions is a notoriously tricky business.

Any statement about the future (which is, by definition, uncertain) has some percentage chance of looking absurd in retrospect - and it's a lot harder to make a correct prediction than a wrong one.

making predictions is a notoriously tricky business

Was it too tricky for a physicist like Lord Kelvin, the founder of Thermodynamics, to see that birds are heavier than air?

Was it too tricky for Edison to see that direct current loses the battle at long distances (because of resistance issues)?

How about Einstein rejecting the possibility of using nuclear power 10 years before he started working on just that?

Aren't these examples of narrow-mindedness of these people, who otherwise invented great stuff?

(I'm not really disagreeing with you, but) you have the benefit of hindsight.

Admittedly, I haven't invented any great stuff, but if I were to claim that it'll never be possible for a human being to travel at greater than light speed, am I going to look narrow-minded in n years time? (where n=10, 100, 1000)

In physics, it is always smarter to predict possibilities, as opposed to impossibilities ;)

What is kind of insulting to humankind is that we do not realize how we suck at predicting the future.

This puts a huge smile on a guy who invented something brand new and either hears awesome or WTF? I work for those who say awesome and to the WTFs I will now send them this article :)

A lot of misquotes there or things taken out of context, I wanted to pick one or two but then just gave up.

My personal favorite:

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

- Charles H. Duell, U.S. Commissioner of Patents, in 1899.

That's a misquote.

http://everything2.com/e2node/Everything%2520that%2520can%25...

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