Technologists always get it wrong, part 2

Back in 2005 I blogged some of the more famous quotes that were diametrically opposite of what turned out to be the case. Here are a few more I've collected. I wonder how (sometimes very eminent) people feel when they get it so wrong - when they fail to see the situation so dramatically. I think the Y2k hoax was a splendid example of this - where vested interests overtook sense and truth.

While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.

Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer, 1926.

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.

Radio has no future.

Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist.

This `telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a practical form of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.

Western Union internal memo, 1878

Well informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.

Editorial in the Boston Post, 1865

...no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air...

Simon Newcomb (1835-1909), astronomer, head of the U.S. Naval Observatory

What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stagecoaches?

The Quarterly Review, England (March 1825)

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

Lord Kelvin (1824-1907)

Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.

Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859) Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy

Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.

Marshal Ferdinand Foch, French military strategist and World War I commander.

The Internet will catastrophically collapse in 1996.

Robert Metcalfe, internet inventor

We have reached the limits of what is possible with computers.

John Von Neumann, 1949

There is no hope for the fanciful idea of reaching the Moon because of insurmountable barriers to escaping the Earth's gravity.

Dr. Forest Ray Moulton, University of Chicago astronomer, 1932.

There is growing evidence that smoking has pharmacological effects that are of real value to smokers.

President of Philip Morris, Inc., 1962

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.

All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk.

Ronald Reagan, 1980

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 demanding the funding of the Smithsonian Institution be cut off.

Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation. So let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emissions standards for man-made sources.

Ronald Reagan, 1980

X-rays are a hoax.

Lord Kelvin, ca. 1900

Lord Kelvin features a little too heavily in this list for my liking! Also - Ronald Reagan clearly made comments about things he didn't understand.

Technologists always get it wrong!

I was going over some old BBC training manuals recently and inside the front cover of one was a quote from the chief engineer of the Beeb from the mid-50's - In relation to VERA (the BBC's experimental video recorder that pre-dated 2" Quadraplex - loads of stuff online if you're interested) he said some thing along the lines of;

we'll never need more than three VTRs because even with the second network (what was to become BBC2) we'd only need one per network and a spare

How wrong can you be! Anyhow - he's in good company as a quick trip around famous quotes relating to predicating the future of technology indicates;

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.

Ken Olson, Digital Equipment Corporation (1977)

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.

Thomas Watson, IBM (1943)

640k ought to be enough for anybody.

Bill Gates, Microsoft Corporation (1981)

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.

Popular Mechanics (1949)

Why does it prove so hard to be realistic about the future? I think (in part) people find the implications of Moore's Law hard to believe - but it's been good for nearly half a century. In five years we will have the following;

• More than a terrabyte of storage in the PC you buy from PC World
  
• More than ten gigs of RAM in that PC
  
• A graphics card that can manipulate cinema resolution images in realtime
  
• 100BaseT internet connection at home
  
• An OS that crashes more often, requires ten times the resources of today and lets you word-process at roughly the level of efficiency as you could in the early nineties under Windows 3 on a '486!

How is it that the hardware guys give us so much more but the software boys don't do it better? What Mr Intel giveth Mr Microsoft taketh

I saw this title on a 2nd hand book stall and had to buy it! Actually Sarah spotted it and pointed it out to me and it brought back a flood of memories from five years ago. I was chief engineer at Resolution at the time and suffered a daily pestering by various "Y2K consultants" from the Beeb et al. To a man (no ladies were stupid enough to be sucked in to that degree!) they were clearly riding a gravy train that they were going to suck dry! I'd upgraded every OS and bit of application software as per manufacturer recommendations but that wasn't enough - no sir!

"Is that combination door lock Y2k compliant?"
"No - it's a mechanical gadget that has no notion of the date"
"That's not good enough - if you guys are going to get BBC/Channel 4/etc etc millennium certification you're going to have to provide me with manufacturer documentation to show it is compliant"

Suffice to say we sailed through the 1999-2000 junction with no problems - I'd simulated it twice at Resolution (and once at my previous firm Oasis TV) - but that kind of level-headed thinking cut no mustard with the folks from the Y2k industry!

Anyhow - I noticed some interesting trends in the run up to 2000 - aside from the hundreds of books by doom-mongers like Mr Wiles (have these people ever been taken seriously since?) there were well defined attitudes in all the people who wanted the world to end by the close of 1999

• Once people had woken up to the fact that programmers had been addressing the issue for most of the nineties and databases are used to badly formatted input the danger turned to "embedded systems" - everything from your car's electronic ignition to nuclear missiles were going to go wrong. All the people I spoke to wouldn't accept the fact that most microcoontrollers know nothing about large time periods - your engine management operates over hundreds of milliseconds (or at most months for the service interval). The view of engineers who dealt with embedded controllers on a daily basis counted for nothing over the views of the doom merchants.
  
• By mid-1998 it was fashionable for the Y2k industry to imply that although the USA would be OK all those Johnny foreigner countries would cause the trouble - racism was everywhere! In the end Italy spent less than 1% of what the UK spent on Y2k preparedness and they suffered less than our modest amount of pain!
  
• In the aftermath of new year 2000 I read lots of online comments from people like Gary North claiming that the US administration was covering up the nature of the problem and we'd see the collapse of society etc etc soon - perhaps he is still holed up in a cave in Montana living on beef jerky and listening to his clockwork radio!

So there you go - a real trip down misery lane!