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Monday, May 6, 2013

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A Few Predictions That Were Totally Off-Base (26 pics)

Variety magazine, 1955
Charles Darwin, writing in the foreword to On the Origin of Species, 1859

Economist Irving Fisher in October 1929, three days before the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression



A Decca Records executive to the band's manager, Brian Epstein, following an audition in 1962. He continued: "We don't like your boys' sound. Groups are out. Four-piece groups with guitars, particularly, are finished."



Time magazine, 1968



John Langdon-Davies, A Short History of the Future, 1936



Margaret Thatcher, Oct. 26, 1969



Guglielmo Marconi, pioneer of radio, writing in Technical World magazine, October 1912



Kaiser Wilhelm II to German troops at the outset of World War One, August 1914



Surgeon General of the United States William H. Stewart, speaking to the U.S. Congress in 1969



Lt. Joseph Ives, after visiting the Grand Canyon in 1861



Dr. Dionysys Larder, science writer and academic, in 1828



Robert Millikan, American physicist and Nobel Prize winner, 1923



New York Times, 1936



Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, in InfoWorld magazine, December 1995



The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Company, 1903



William Orton, president of Western Union, in 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell tried to sell the company his invention



Charlie Chaplin in 1916, two years into his big-screen acting career. The rest of the quote: "It's canned drama. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage.



An aide to British military commander Field Marshal Haig wrote this in a report following a tank demonstration, 1916



Thomas Edison, 1889. The lightbulb inventor insisted his own direct current (DC) system was superior to competitor George Westinghouse's AC power, and took every opportunity to discredit alternating current



Mary Somerville, pioneer of radio educational broadcasts, 1948



Byte magazine editor Edmund DeJesus, 1998



Alan Sugar, 2005



Popular Mechanics, 1949



Sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling in The New York Times, 2007


Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, 2007

1 comments:

  1. I found the quote from Charlie Chaplin in 1916 the most intersting because in 1919 Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and he founded the United Artists Production Company.

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