What Previous Predictions Tell Us About Our Assumptions
- Graham
- Mar 14
- 3 min read
While researching a new speech I'm writing, I've been collecting outrageously wrong predictions from history. As well as being comically incorrect, in some cases they also allude to the mindset of the time.
Take, for example, Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the British Post Office, who said in 1878: "The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys."
Now, 150 years ago it might have made sense to pity those losers in America who had to look to technology to make up for their pitiful lack of messenger boys. But I think it should make us pause to look around us and see what assumptions we're making that could cloud our opinions about what might be next.
Interestingly, that same year, Western Union published a memo dismissing the telephone as having "too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication."
In fact, it seems information technology has been particularly prone to naysayers through the ages. In 1897, for example, Lord Kelvin, president of the pre-eminent science organisation the Royal Society, was quoted as saying, "Radio has no future." This wasn't the first time Lord Kelvin was off the mark. I'll come back to him, though.
Cinema was next up, and even Charlie Chaplin was an initial skeptic: "The cinema is little more than a fad. It's canned drama. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage." He said this in 1916, when he was already in films but had yet to become universally famous.
And, of course, he managed to become famous in an era when film was silent, which, according to some, was how it was supposed to be: "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" (Harry Warner of Warner Bros, 1927).
Then came television. Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century Fox, was not convinced it was an improvement on talking movies. In 1946, he said, "People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."
No sooner had we gotten used to staring at plywood, then plastic(!), boxes than computers entered the public consciousness. And once again, it was those closest to the technology who seemed hardest to persuade of its value.
Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corp., which made business mainframe computers, believed in 1977 that computing was a business thing that we shouldn't as individuals worry our pretty little heads about: "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
As computer power seeped into our homes, so did the means to connect them. One of the companies that brought machines together through ethernets was 3Com. Founder Robert Metcalfe went out on a limb in 1995 with this forecast: "I predict the internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse." He promised to eat his words if wrong, which he did a few years later by pulverising his speech and drinking it.
But back to the good Lord Kelvin, who forecast nothing but woe for proponents of the radio. It appears he saw himself as something of a guardian of good science, dismissing research into radiation in 1883 ("X-rays will prove to be a hoax") and airplanes in 1895 ("Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible").
With barely a messenger boy in sight, the American Wright brothers took to the skies just eight years later.
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