Improving Our Standard of Living (Wattpad Edition)

Chapter 47: Failed Predictions

Futurists aside, many people view technology as progressing more slowly than it is. They assume that renewable energy, self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, asteroid mining, nanorobotics, full-immersion virtual reality, and life extension will arrive centuries into the future, if ever.

Attitudes have changed over the last few years regarding self-driving cars. But not long ago, only a handful of people, including myself, knew they were coming.

Pessimists seem to forget that we take for granted technologies that 99% of us would have thought impossible just 15 years ago. Still, rather than being optimistic about technological progress, many individuals are the reverse. Even scientists.

Below is a list of innovations people thought would never happen. Many of these predictions were from experts in their respective fields. Since they got it wrong, you can imagine how clueless the average person is regarding the pace of technological innovation.

How, sir, would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I pray you, excuse me, I have not the time to listen to such nonsense. – Napoleon Bonaparte, commenting on Robert Fulton's steamboat, 1800s

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, University College, London

What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice the speed of stagecoaches? – Quarterly Review, comment on railroads, 1825

The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it... Knife and pain are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient. – Dr. Alfred Velpeau, French surgeon, commenting on the impossibility of anesthesia, 1839

Men might as well project a voyage to the Moon as attempt to employ steam navigation against the stormy North Atlantic Ocean. – Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859), Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College, London.

There is a young madman proposing to light the streets of London—with what do you suppose—with smoke! – Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), on the idea of lighting cities with gaslights

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. –The Boston Post, 1865

Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction. – Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872

The dangers are obvious. Stores of gasoline in the hands of people interested primarily in profit would constitute a fire and explosive hazard of the first rank. Horseless carriages [cars] propelled by gasoline might attain speeds of 14 or even 20 miles per hour. The menace to our people of vehicles of this type hurtling through our streets and along our roads and poisoning the atmosphere would call for prompt legislative action even if the military and economic implications were not so overwhelming... [T]he cost of producing [gasoline] is far beyond the financial capacity of private industry... In addition the development of this new power may displace the use of horses, which would wreck our agriculture. – U. S. Congressional Record, 1875

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

When the Paris Exhibition [of 1878] closes, electric light will close with it and no more will be heard of it. – Erasmus Wilson, Oxford professor