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Throughout history, experts, executives, scientists, and journalists have tried to predict what the future would look like.
Some of those predictions were insightful. Others were so spectacularly wrong that they became famous in their own right.
They dismissed revolutionary inventions, underestimated new technologies, and confidently predicted the exact opposite of what happened.
Learn more about some of the world’s worst predictions on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Predicting the future is difficult. Some people have pulled off incredibly prescient guesses about what the future would hold. Others haven’t just been wrong; they have been spectacularly wrong.
They might have overestimated or underestimated technologies or trends, or completely missed what was obvious to everyone else.
To be fair, predicting the future isn’t easy. If it were, everyone would do it. But there is a difference between wrong and spectacularly wrong, and that is the focus of this episode.
We’ll start with one of the worst predictions by someone who was otherwise quite talented, Irving Fisher.
Irving Fisher was an American economist, statistician, and Yale professor born in 1867. He became one of the most influential economists of the early 20th century, especially for his work on interest rates, inflation, capital theory, and the relationship between money and prices. His ideas helped shape what later became modern monetary economics.
Many economists, including Joseph Schumpeter, Milton Friedman, and James Tobin, considered him to be one of the greatest economists the United States has ever produced.
However, his reputation was tainted by one enormously wrong statement. On October 15, 1929, days before the stock market crashed, he said, “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
He was speaking to the Purchasing Agents Association at its monthly dinner meeting. He also said, “Largely through the influence of the investment trust movement, the public has been waking up to the superior attraction of stocks over bonds. And I believe the operation of the investment trusts, as a whole, has acted to stabilize the stock market rather than to make its fluctuations more violent.”
Needless to say, the stock market wasn’t more stable, and it wasn’t sitting at a permanently high plateau. It wasn’t just that he was wrong; it was that he was wrong just days before things fell apart.
Speaking of bad timing, another horribly timed prediction appeared in a New York Times editorial on October 9, 1903. The editorial, titled Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly, responded to Samuel Langley’s attempt to test a flying machine just days earlier.
The editorial wrote: [It] might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years… No doubt the problem has attractions for those it interests, but to the ordinary man it would seem as if effort might be employed more profitably.
It turned out they didn’t need to wait ten million years or even one million. Just sixty-nine days later, the Wright Brothers conducted their first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
So they were off by only a factor of several million.
Lord Kelvin, who was one of the discoverers of the Laws of Thermodynamics, was wrong about a whole host of things.
He was invited to join the Aeronautical Society, which he declined, saying: “I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of the expectation of good results from any of the trials we hear of … I would not care to be a member of the Aeronautical Society.”
When X-rays were discovered that could penetrate the human body, he said, “X-rays will prove to be a hoax.”
And not to be outdone, when radio was invented he said, “Radio has no future.” and “Wireless [telegraphy] is all very well, but I’d rather send a message by a boy on a pony!”
It should be noted he later recanted his views on radio after using it after a transatlantic voyage.
Skepticism about flying is somewhat understandable for the period, but it wasn’t the only transportation technology people doubted.
According to a 1922 biography of Henry Ford, a banker advised prospective Ford investor Horace Rackham: “The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad.”
Rackham ignored the advice, invested $5,000, which he later sold for $12 million.
Someone who passed up a world-changing investment was William Orton, President of the Western Union Telegraph Company. Before he founded Bell Telephone, Alexander Graham Bell offered Orton the chance to buy the telephone patent for $100,000.
Orton turned him down and wrote about the telephone in an internal corporate memo saying: “The idea of installing ‘telephones’ in every city is idiotic… Why would any person want to use this ungainly and impractical device when he can send a messenger to the telegraph office and have a clear written message sent to any large city in the US? This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”
Bell Telephone would go on to become the largest company in the United States.
Darryl F. Zanuck, the powerful head of 20th Century Fox Studios, was massively wrong when predicting the future of television. He said in 1951, “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.
Not to be outdone, Orrin E. Dunlap Jr., a writer for the New York Times, published in 1939, The problem with television is that the people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it. Therefore, the showmen are convinced that for this reason, if for no other, television will never be a serious competitor of broadcasting.
Being wrong isn’t just about inventions and technology. Some people have really wiffed on cultural trends.
The Beatles manager Brian Epstein, in his 1965 memoir, recounted what happened when the Beatles tried to get signed by Decca Records. As Epstein recalled “We had coffee, and Mr. Rowe, a short plump man, said to me: “Not to mince words, Mr. Epstein, we don’t like your boys’ sound. Groups of four guitarists are on the way out.”
Likewise, in 1911, the New York Times published a review of an exhibition by the painter Pablo Picasso in Paris. They wrote: “It is to be regretted that this unquestionably talented artist… should now make his debut with a series of childish, not to say imbecile, scribbles that are no interest either as independent works of art or as steps toward achieving the complete work. They have neither material beauty nor that ‘spiritual significance’… nor merit of any other sort”
However, without a doubt, the worst predictions have been in the area of computers. Throughout the history of computing, there are example after example of people underestimating what computers could do.
In 1949, Popular Mechanics Magazine made a very tame prediction. At the time, the ENIAC computer used 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighed 30 tons. They predicted, “computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1 ½ tons.”
The computing pioneer John von Neumann not only made a horribly wrong prediction in 1949, but he predicted that his own prediction would be wrong. He said, “It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.”
One of the oddest predictions regarding the internet came from someone who had a pivotal role to play in the creation of computer networking. Robert Metcalfe was the co-inventor of Ethernet and founded 3Com.
In the mid-1990s, he was convinced that the growth of the Internet would cause it to collapse in a spectacular fashion. He said, Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet’s continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet, which only just recently got this section here in InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.
Of course the collapse of the Internet didn’t occur in 1996, nor in any year thereafter.
Metcalfe was a good sport about being wrong. In 1997, he made a video of himself blending a piece of paper with his prediction and drinking it, so he literally ate his words.
Many people back in the 90s were skeptical of the internet. Perhaps the most famous wrong prediction came from Nobel Laureate Economist Paul Krugman, who said The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.
Needless to say, the impact of the Internet has been a bit greater than that of the fax machine.
One of the best-selling tech products of all time has been the iPhone, but there was a time when no one was sure if Apple could or would release such a device.
In 2006, the New York Times tech writer David Pogue wrote, Everyone’s always asking me when Apple will come out with a cellphone. My answer is, probably never. I cannot imagine Apple giving veto power to ANYONE over its software design. It just ain’t gonna happen.
Less than one year later, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone.
Even after it was announced, many people thought it would fail. In particular, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer thought that the iPhone would fall on its face. In April 2007, before it actually went on sale, he said, “Right now, we’re selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year. Apple is selling zero phones a year. In six months, they’ll have the most expensive phone by far in the marketplace, and let’s see how they do. But there’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”
Of course, Apple isn’t immune to getting things wrong either. In 2003, Steve Jobs explained that the streaming music business model would never work. He noted, The subscription model of buying music is bankrupt. I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model, and it might not be successful. If it costs you $10 a month, or over $100 a year, for a subscription fee to rent that song, that means for me to listen to my favorite song, in 10 years I paid over $1,000 in subscription fees to listen to my favorite song 10 years from now, and that just doesn’t fly with customers. They don’t want subscriptions.
Spotify became a multibillion-dollar business, proving Steve Jobs wrong.
Bad predictions are usually less interesting because someone was wrong than because they reveal how difficult it is to imagine a future that breaks sharply from the present. Experts tend to project existing technologies, habits, and markets forward, while revolutions often come from changes that make those assumptions obsolete.
The telephone, airplane, computer, Internet, and smartphone all looked limited or unnecessary to people who understood the world as it already existed.
History’s worst predictions are reminders that expertise can explain the present very well while still offering no guarantee of seeing what comes next.