The naysayers

Everybody’s wrong about something…or probably about most things. Here’s a collection of well-known and respected people and publications and the things they were wrong about. A sampling:

When the Paris Exhibition closes electric light will close with it and no more be heard of.
- Erasmus Wilson (1878) Professor at Oxford University

Radio has no future.
- Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), British mathematician and physicist, ca. 1897.

The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty — a fad.
- Advice from a president of the Michigan Savings Bank to Henry Ford’s lawyer Horace Rackham. Rackham ignored the advice and invested $5000 in Ford stock, selling it later for $12.5 million.

That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.
- Scientific American, Jan. 2, 1909.

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.