Predictions Are Hard!

into the future alone. I have a feeling he's going to be very upset with us when he comes back and finds out what this topic is, because I'm sure he would have wanted to have been a part of this, actually that that had occurred to me. He's going to be touts unhappy. But maybe that just means that we can do a sequel episode. There's there's no shortage of what we're about to talk about, which is bad predictions

about the future. See, this show is all about talking about the future and kind of extrapolating from what we know out and guessing what is going to come in the future. But as it turns out, that's really tough to do, and history is filled with examples of people making bold, unfounded predictions that they're they're beautiful in their scope and ridiculousness. Yeah, now we've got we've got a bunch of those listed that we're going to talk about.

Some of them actually either come close to the truth or you can understand why they were wrong at the time that the prediction was made, because the conditions were so very different at that time and you could not have necessarily anticipated the changes that would make our reality as we know it possible. Sure, and some of them are founded in a pure misunderstanding of things like physics. That's true. So first, before we even start off, I

want to give a huge shout out. There's an amazing blog called Paleo Future, which researches, collects, and presents a rich assortment of predictions, both accurate and hilariously off target. So you can just go to paleo future dot com and they have the blogs there. That was incredibly helpful because it's all divided up by decade if you really want to go decade by decade. Most of the ones that I have for the early predictions came from there,

not all of them, but a lot of them. Uh, the later predictions came from multiple places, because you'll discover that inaccurate predictions about the future are not limited to say,

the late nineteenth century. We're still doing them today, Lauren and I actually do them annually because on our other show Tex stuff we make at the beginning of the year, we make a predictions episode where we predict what will happen in the following twelve months, and then at the very end of the year we come back and rate ourselves. This this it's always a sliding scale. This past year

was squid basses last year. But you never know. I mean it's look, I just I just follow the instructions that get slid under my door along with some weird sticky smoke stuff. I don't I don't question it. So yeah, every every year we're pretty wrong. We liked make that annual tradition, so more in good company we are. We

are in such good companies. Starting back in eighteen seventy six. Yeah, so this is a prediction from Sir William Priest, who was of the British Post Office, who said the Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys. How's that working out for you England? Yeah, good job. I bet those messenger boys are awful busy swimming across the Atlantic to deliver the missives over here for people who want to make those

long distance messenger boy calls. Oh yeah, Um, one of those moments where someone saw a technology and saw no practical use for it whatsoever and just snootily lifted his, well, his his noble English proboscis into the air. Also, being that he was, you know, affiliated with the post office, it could be that there was a little bit of a you know, a little a little little bit of a bias. Share absolutely and next one also from eighteen seventy six, and also with a little bit of a bias.

The quote is this telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. Um. That was from a memo within Western Union. Yeah, also a little conflict there. Western Union definitely didn't really care if the telephone. In fact did not want the telephone to to succeed. Uh. Spoiler alert for those who had not

been keeping up with news, the telephones wildly popular. One could say Western Unions send it's less telegram back in two thousand and six, so just saying eighty nine a Cornhill University professor named Dr Thurston said that steam engines would remain the most important technology for centuries, and the gas engines and electricity would only be used for small industries, not great ones, and that steam would even drive the engines of quote flying trains end quote that could cross

the continent in two days. And that's one of those basic misunderstandings of physics. I think, I I don't. I don't think that that's how steamed. Well. I think Cornell University professor he might have had a good grip on on physics, but just thought that you would be able to constantly scale up steam power, which is not the truth. You can't constantly scale it up unless you were able to generate incredible amounts of heat that would melt anything

closely resembling a steam engine. And I suppose to be fair, most forms of electricity are are still based around steam power. It's all. It's all turbines burning stuff to make steam to turn turbines. Yeah. So I guess, if you want to be really um, I guess technical, it's kind of steam ish, But yeah, it's not steam engines the way that he was he was envisioning now to be fair. Also, at the time, gas engines were not terribly safe or

productive there. This was right around the time that the carburetor was being designed, and before the carburetor had really taken form. Gasoline engines were more dangerous than useful. So when you spark really flammable liquid, yeah, stuff burns, as it turns out, So unless you've got the right mix of air and fuel, you stand the chance of burning down whatever it is you're trying to power. So it's understandable,

but it still was a very wrong prediction. In fact, steam power would fade from prominence rapidly after the the late nineteenth century and gasoline would take over. Um, So yeah,

that was that one was pretty wrong. Eighte we have the Newark Daily Advocate, which had four journalists make predictions for what the year n three would look like, and one of the highlights was saying that Chicago would be the greatest city in the United States, that out of all the cities, Chicago would be number one, and that if you were to go out west, there would be many grand cities, but none so grand as Salt Lake City, which would be the most beautiful and extensive city in

all of the West and that Denver would end up being as large as New York City. I pulled the census from the nineteen nineties and by Chicago was down to being the third largest city in the US, having fallen behind Los Angeles, and Denver was in twenty sixth place, with six point four percent of the population of New

York City. So at the end of the nineteenth century, I think the idea was that there was going to be this explosion of population growth in the West, not the West coast, but as far as Denver, that that was just an area of opportunity that was going to really catch on. And it just, uh, you know, it grew. It just didn't grow exponentially the way they had anticipated. Sure in other cities. I mean I don't think that anyone really anticipated that suburbs of San Francisco We're going

to grow the way that they did. Well yeah, yeah, before Silicon Valley, no one would have imagined that San Francisco would have been what it is today. I mean, today it's one of the most expensive areas in the world to live in, if not the most to do. Like San Francisco Paris, like they're there are a couple of cities that are that are rivaling each other for

a most expensive city ever. Uh. Meanwhile, right around the year nineteen hundred UM exactly when is somewhat of a mystery because we don't have the actual dates on the illustrations. A French illustrated by the name Albert Robida created a lithograph depicting what it would be like to travel to the opera in the year two thousand, because clearly traveling to the opera is still going to be at the

top of everyone's list of things to do. You know, the Atlanta Opera Company wonderful organization, but I don't make it out there nearly as frequently as I think Albert would prefer. But in this lithograph you see the well to do all wearing late nineteenth century French clothing because clothing apparently doesn't change in a hundred years. Although to be fair, if I had the option to, I would

wear late nineteenth century French clothing everywhere. I'd go for late uh, late probably eighteenth century, because that like the really tall weeks. But then after that they board flying busses and personal vehicles, flying personal vehicles that looked like something out of uh the Jewels Vernish tomorrow Land stuff. So if you've been to Disneyland and seeing like the the rockets that look like they came straight off a Jewels Verne novel, that's kind of what these things look like.

They were pretty infatuated with with flying vehicles right around that time. Yeah, I've got another one I can't wait to talk about a little bit later, but I'm not going to spoil it. So also around nineteen hundred, this is a big one. So there's a civil engineer named John Watkins, and he wrote an article for the Ladies Home Journal that had a host of predictions in it. I mean, it's a huge, huge article and I will link it when we we put this podcast out because

it's worth the read. There there's some predictions that were pretty good. There are other predictions that were completely wrong. For example, he thought that within a hundred years this this was supposed to be by the year two thousand, we with a limit the letters C, X, and Q from the alphabet can just get rid of them. They're not doing anyone any good. He clearly underestimated the impact that low cats would happen. The letter X Yeah, text speak.

As it turns out, really needs that X letter there so C and Q al right, yeah, sure, who needs them? But that X you can you can do you can do that with a k people. Yeah. So he also predicted that all animals everywhere, with the possible exception of Menagerie's, would go extinct, would be eradicated in fact, like including bugs. Yeah, he said that flies and mosquitoes are unnecessary. Therefore we would actually take the take the end cockroaches, we'd take

the effort to completely extinguish all forms of them. We would kill all of them. But this if you think this is a crazy idea that mankind would just get rid of all animals, it was incredibly prevalent at this time. Actually I didn't include every instance of it because it just one it got depressing, and two and two it was just you know, you really only have to mentioned at once. But he was not the only person to say, oh, in the future, we're not even gonna have animals, because

what use are animals? They don't have any useful purpose. Therefore we could just we don't even need to They're they're not even a consideration. I'm just ever here cringing, which I'm which is playing really well. On radio, I'm sure, but ye, yeah, it's it was pretty pretty rough. He also said all cities would be free of noise because vehicles would move on cushioned wheels, street cars would not exist in major cities, and trains would either be high above ground or below it as a subway. That is

a beautiful dream. Yeah. Yeah, anyone who's listened very carefully to our podcasts knows that that dream has not become a reality. Our our podcast room is on the eleventh floor of a building and faces out towards a busy street. Uh, you could say the busy street in Atlanta, because it is Peachtree and occasionally you might hear some some noises

from there. So not so not so free of noise after But some of the predictions that he did get right, Okay, So he predicted that we would have climate controls for homes, which was not something that was common back in the but it's pretty common these days. Yeah. He he thought of it as spigots that would have either hot air or cold air delivered to your home, So you would actually turn the spigot on and would fill your home

either with cool air or hot air. Now, obviously that's not accurate to how climate control like h VAC units work today. But that but the concept is there. Yeah, he saw a technology that would allow us to be

more comfortable inside, and in fact, that has happened. He also predicted that we'd be able to buy ready cooked meals at establishments without a problem to be reheated at home, so you could go to He he thought of it as like a bakery where you would go and pick up something that had already been cooked and you would just you would take it home and that would save you the trouble of having to cook a meal yourself. Honestly, if this didn't exist, I would only eat about one

out of seven days. If it didn't exist, college students would be extinct, is really what it comes down to. There would not be such a creature as the college student were it not for pre cooked meals. Um. I say that as a former college student. I remember. So. He also predicted that photographs will be telegraphed, so that if something happens in China, you'd see the photos of it an hour later in the United States. He says

this by two thousand, so he does. He foresees a time where we are able to transmit information as in the information and a photograph over radio lines essentially, and so that was a very good prediction, and in fact, that's exactly what we can do now, but because telegraphs

pretty quickly. But it's pretty cool. Yeah, So anyway, I'll, like I said, I'll include a list of all his predictions, because trust me, there are a ton more, and I wanted to include lots of them, but I knew that if I did that, it would just be a podcast about his predictions, which I guess we could have done, but it would have been better if we had been able to do that back in two thousand, the year when those predictions would have either been true or false

for the first time, because it was one years. Hence, well, in the next fifty years, when we actually create that way back machine, well then we can go back and our next episode will actually be recorded years before how Stuff Works was really a thing in our lives. So that'll be exciting. Nineteen o one, we have a French illustrator apparently named Monier based upon the Ormonier, I should say,

based upon the signature on the art. However, the only illustrator, French illustrator I know whose name is Monier is Henree Monier who passed away about three decades before nineteen o one, so it's clearly not him. But anyway, there's some sketches of people using personal flying devices, you know, like jet packs, except they're not jet packs. They were wings and propellers.

Like imagine a gentleman in a suit coat, a long suit coat, obvious he's got he's got wings on his back, and a propeller is sticking out of the bottom of the suit coat allowing him to fly through the air, so it looks like he's got a propeller coming out of his posterior. Same thing with ladies, except out of the bottom of their dresses. Their dresses also outfitted with very stylish Edison style lightbulbs to light the way, because you don't want to fly in the dark. Um and

uh yeah, they because they're French illustrations. One of them shows a lady flying off and a gentleman flying right behind her, his hand over his heart. Clearly he's infatuated with her, and it essentially the little message underneath says how a man will follow a lady in the future. We have a New Zealand Star article that was called the morning Tub a hundred years hence, which I thought

was a truly charming title for an article. It predicted that by two thousand six, we would all be so eager to spend our leisure moments pursuing various activities that we would invent a tub that would get us clean much faster than the traditional bathtub. So it would use oxygenated water propelled against us to replace scrubbing. Um. You wouldn't have to do any kind of physical scrubb because the water does it for you. There'd be a drying cabinet.

You'd step into the drying cabinet and it would mechanically use little soft brushes to dry the skin, and then it would invigorate your skin, possibly using electricity, so that you were full of them and vigor in the morning. Yeah, I figured nothing. Nothing really gets the blood going like electroshock therapy. Also, another thing I didn't really include with these predictions, but is very true of this particular time, the early early twentieth century, was that a lot of

people held magical beliefs about electricity. They thought electricity could cure everything from mental disease to obesity. Uh. They thought that, you know, they saw that electricity could have power over where things like it can make a dead muscle contract. They also knew that there were some electrical impulses going on with the brain, and that if you were to encounter electrical impulses that could totally short circuit you. So some of their beliefs were understandable because it was based

upon a lack of information. But yeah, this is just one example of an idea of using electricity for quote unquote magical purposes. So after you get all that, you know, showering done or bathing done and drying and electricity through your skin, then you could take an elevator down to breakfast, right, because no one in the future has time for stairs. No, there's a lot of moving sidewalks in these predictions too, but I skipped those because come on anyway, and then

you know, take your news. You either read a newspaper or perhaps even use a device that talks to you and speaks the day's news into your ear. That's that's wild. Actually, at the time, that was pretty wild. I was relatively wild. Um. The for news radio broadcast is believed to not have

happened until in Detroit. Public broadcasting itself began as early as just four years after this prediction in nineteen ten, when tenor Enrico Caruso sang from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York to various receivers throughout the city, and in fact, a lot of other interesting uh predictions said that radio would allow in an unparalleled era of culture because you would be able to listen to the world's most famous artists performing music, singing opera, this sort of

stuff by going to a place that has a radio and being able to hear it, and it would be just as good as if you were there. The idea being that the technology itself would improve to the point where you would listen to it from a radio and it would be as if you were standing in the venue itself. That was and again another way that people were kind of projecting forward based upon the technology of

the time, How could this improve? What would it be like in the future, And a lot of them were saying, well, in a hundred years, you'll be able to listen to anybody anywhere doing whatever it is you want to hear through the radio, because again that their minds were limited by what they already Sure, sure, no one back then

was really imagining YouTube right. No, not even even the YouTube founder, as we'll find out, had his doubts much much later than New York Tribune included a sobering warning about all those flying machines that are going to be everywhere, pointing out that burglars would soon find a way to fly aircraft silently and thus land on rooftops to rob

people blind. Nineteen eleven. Okay, so, Thomas Edison was asked to write a little bit about what he thought the future would be like, what the world would be like a hundred years from nineteen eleven. Yeah, and uh yeah he he had a lot of interesting predictions, some of which were a little off the mark. For example, he said that bars of gold would become as cheap and plentiful as bars of iron or steel by because he thought we were on the brink of discovering the secret

of transmutation like alchemy. Yeah, we're talking, you know, sixteenth century ideas of being able to transform one material into another through some form physical or chemical process. How is Edison? I'm disappointed in you. He had to take a break between electrocuting elephants to death to come up with some other ideas so you know, we all know that was

an Edison who literally did that. No, he just condoned it. Uh. Also that elephant was a killer, but still I think deserved a full trial and not just a summary execution. He also predicted that the material of home furnishings and construction would be primarily steel. We would move away from wood home furnishing steel. Yeah, like your table would be made out of steel, your chairs would be made out of steel. Cradle, baby cradle totally made out of steel.

And that steel itself would become lighter and stronger over time, so that you could have a sideboard, was his example. You could have a sideboard made up of steel that would be lighter and easier to move and more rugged than a wooden sideboard. So when you have to move the sideboard, as I'm sure we're all familiar with, I I don't even know why I bother putting a sideboard in. All I do is move it, um. But you would be able to do so much more easily with a

steel one than woulden one. So he really thought we were going to move away from that. He also thought that books would move away from paper pages. He thought that we would start making books using leaves of nickel, and those leaves and nickel would be thinner, more flexible, and more durable than paper. So you could have a book that's more durable than a traditional one. A two inch thick book with these leaves of nickel pages would have enough pages in it to hold a hundred volumes

in one two inch book. So because very thin metal in in congregate is obviously lighter than would pulp, well might not be lighter, but it would be more compact, is his argument. Um, yeah, it was. It was kind of an interesting idea, the idea of being able to carry a library around with you, which in fact has happened, although it's happened digitally, not physically. So his all of these top few revealed to me a kind of basic

misunderstanding of materials. Yeah, yeah, well, you know again, Basing, he was making predictions based upon the world around him, and he was probably grouchy that day. Tesla man have said something that really ticked him off, you know, But but he did get he did get some things right. He did. He said that steam engines would fade into obscurity.

He disagreed with our our Cornell professor from earlier He said that they would fade into obscurity and that we rely nearly exclusively on electricity, which granted Thomas Edison, he's got he's got a stake in that whole electricity thing. I don't I don't mean to say he's going in it without bias, but he was right. He also predicted that we'd use large aircraft to fly at incredible speeds. Now, his version of incredible speed was two hundred miles per

which is slow for a coramcial aircraft. However, he was thinking of, you know, think about it, like, at this time, the idea of a large flying aircraft that could move at these speeds was not a very common idea. The idea of a heavier than air uh aircraft was was still very much in this kind of weird experimental phase. Right. It had been less than a decade before that that the Wright brothers had taken their first flight. So yeah,

so it's it's pretty impressive for him to go on this. UH. That was a that was a pretty bold prediction that ended up being more or less true. Actually ended up being a little modest because we can fly it much faster than two under three. We get a really official prediction from the Surgeon General Hugh S. Cummings, who predicted that in the future all food would be in pill form.

I've always heard this action I did not realize. I mean, I'm not certain that Cummings was the first person to suggest this, but I didn't realize how far back this idea of in the future all food will be in

pill I think it has a nineteen fifties so. But yeah, he had, and he had talked about how people had already started creating dehydrated food that reduced food down to seventy of its original volume, and so that it's just a matter of time before we get this to a point where you know, we no longer bothered by the

drudgery of eating a meal. Yeah, people had some as Joe and I went into in our three D Printed Food episode, we people had some really interesting ideas about the bothersomeness of acquiring nutrition, which, which to be fair, is totally bothersome. I mean, that's having to eat three

times a day things. It doesn't make me think that Cummings needed to go to a couple of the restaurants I like, because once you once you experience like I don't know, yeah burger, and you get one of those yeah burgers, you would not want to replace that with a pill. You would not know. All right, here's here's where one of the guys have a very controversial person in film history, uh, very influential and also made one of the films that was possibly the most hateful movie

I've ever seen. D W. Griffith, pioneer filmmaker. He directed The Birth of a Nation, which that's the that's the movie. Incredibly influential. It established a lot of editing techniques and filmmaking techniques that people still use today. Also dealt with the the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, so not exactly a charming story. Anyway. He predicted that there wouldn't be any way to transmit moving pictures to Holmes, and that the cinema would become more important, eventually replacing libraries.

You could go to a library and request a film, the idea being that kind of like you go to or you could go to a cinema and request a film, like you could go to a library and request a book. So he thought that this this, uh, this concept of something like television was completely baseless. Of course, filmmaker so again you have that that bias you come from the worldview from a certain perspective. We have Eddie Rickenbacker, who is a pilot, who said within the next two decades

autos will be made with folding wings. He foresaw a time where the motorists would become a pilot. Okay, to be fair, people had already been designing flying cars and or roadable airplanes since nineteen seventeen um, which for the record is just fourteen years after the Right Brothers took that first flight of theirs Um. But of course we

are still waiting to see a widespread version. And as we have talked about on the show before and and those early early car flying car thingies all either had fixed wings, which meant that they were you know, roadable planes, like they couldn't really drive on the road either because they were too wide, or they had detachable wings. But not these weird kind of folding wings that could unfold from a car and turn your car into a plane. We're still waiting on those. I mean, we all know that,

we've done episodes about it. So but yeah, he he said that by nineteen four they would be commonplace. So that didn't happen personally, I blame World War two. Hugo Gernsback wrote some predictions about what the world would be like within fifty years, so that would make it nineteen seventy five. So here are his predictions for nineteen seventy five. First of all, he correctly predicted that broadcast television would become a thing that essentially he was saying moving pictures

by radio, which is more or less broadcast television. But he was really really excited by radio, like kind of the way some of those other people were excited about electricity. He thought that we would be able to teleport physical objects using radio waves. So yeah, so you could take you can mind coal and then you could teleport the coal directly to the power plant without having to transport it from one place to another, using this kind of

miraculous technology. And his point was saying that if you look back, like the predictions I'm going to give are going to sound crazy to you. But if you went back fifty years and tried to tell someone about X rays, they would think you were crazy. That was his his justification. He also said that we would all wear electric skates to get around instead of walking, and that these electric skates would less travel eight or ten miles per hour

and would be powered by radio waves. Would actually have a wire going up from the skates all the way up our bodies to us say, a hat, which would an antenna hat that would gather energy through radio waves. I want I want this feature. I want it right now. It's like being Dazzler, except with with a really cool hat.

I'm pretty sure we can get you a hat with an antenna sticking out of it, and maybe some of those sneakers that have the skate the little skates worked into them, and you could at least pretend that's I'd take it. All right, This as close as I think I can get you. We have our first possibly apocryphal prediction, This one from Thomas Watson, who was chairman of IBM, who who allegedly said, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. This this one is is

in really quite heavy dispute. No one can find the source of it outside of some Usenet posts, and Watson was not active one no and and newspaper columns dating from the nineteen eighties or later. Um. Some think it might be a corruption or misattribution of a quote from someone, and and sources on who that someone is very pretty widely from the nineteen fifties or so about the UK only needing three to five computers ever, either way at

any rate shortsighted prediction. Well, you know, at the time, computers were these vacuum tube house sized kind of things. Yeah, that could that could do very limited work, like very specific, very limited work. And so I can see I can see that the world market only needing five of those. Well, yeah, I don't have a need for a house sized computer that I have to program physically through punch cards or plugs and switches. That would be ridiculous. You know, need

is a strong word. I'm not saying I wouldn't take one. I mean, if they made Hunt the Wumpus for such a computer, I guess i'd try it anyway. In yes, this one it comes from Darrel's Zenoch, who is of twentieth century Fox and says television won't be able to hold onto any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at Plywood box every night. Yeah. So this is a guy who had already produced over a hundred films by the stage. So

he's one of those people who had some steaks. D W. Griffith. It's funny though there are other filmmakers. Um uh, I think Cecil will be the mill. Actually predicted that cameras and film would become cheap enough for people to be able to produce movies out of their own homes, and that lenses and film production techniques would improve to the point where you wouldn't need super expensive lighting to in

order to get a good picture. His point was saying that one of the limiting factors was that only movie studios at the time could produce pictures because you had to have such incredible amounts of lighting in order to even capture the images on film. He predicted, now within a hundred years, we're going to have these movies done in the home and they're gonna look better than what we can do in the studio right now, which was pretty amazing. I think that that is the difference in thought.

And forgive me Hollywood types who are listening to this between a a director, you know, a kind of creative force, and a producer who is a money making force. Any producers out there who would like to make some money on my ideas, just give me a call. Lauren clearly doesn't understand your importance, but I do. I'm certainly not saying that producers cannot also be a creative force. But but this guy, this guy does not sound like and again he also had a steak like you said, he

had a steak in. This was one of those things that if you were to say, give credence to what could potentially be a really disruptive technology to your business,

then that's considered a bad idea. You know, you don't want to tell everyone that the other guy has got a legitimate fight on their hands, that that's not you want to dismiss it and try and hold SOE Mechanics Illustrated published an article that claimed that helicopters would replace cars and we would fly everywhere, because giving average drivers a flying license is a really good plan. Not to mention a flying license for a helicopter one of the

most difficult types of aircraft to fly. UH. This was based off a single person aircraft design that had reached some popularity a few years earlier. UH. It was somewhat of a dangerous design because the landing gear for this personal helicopter was the pilot's legs. Oh I don't want that. Yeah, where you have to land and you have and it's like a flint stone car. That's no, that's a terrible plan. Funny because the video I saw this in specifically made

that comparison. So yes, it is like a flintstones car. Um. Nineteen fifty five, we have Alex Loot of the Loot Vacuum Company who said nuclear powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality within ten years. Hey, you remember in nineteen sixty five when all those nuclear powered vacuum cleaners hit the market and then the market exploded. Literally Yeah, no, this, Um, this was right in the middle nine. That was the atomic age. Yeah, that's when you have everyone's like automic

power will solve everything. This was before we really had a full appreciation of the dangers of radiation, of the other dangers of of of of nuclear power. I mean, obviously we knew some of it because the Manhattan Project had been over for a decade. We had already seen the proof of the atomic bomb. Yeah, but we were still like painting glow in the dark things with radium to make them glow in the dark. So so yeah, so we had not quite learned our lesson yet Yeah,

kind of interesting. Ninety eight, NASA predicts that we would have a permanent moon base by two thousand seven. Where's my moon base, NASA, We're holding you personally accountable. I understand that you might have had a couple of budget cuts over the past couple of decades, but really, no excuse, no,

no note at all. Uh. Nineteen fifty nine, IBM sent a message to Xerox saying the world potential market for copying machines is five thousand at most right up there to that three to five computers that the world needs. Right again, it was one of those things where the business case was something that was not obvious to one party turned out to be incredibly important. Sure well, also at the time, that's another scalability issue of people not realizing.

I'm assuming those people at IBM didn't realize that copying machines would come down from the near two car sized kind of thing that they were at the time to the merely half a car size drink cart sized. That's also true. Um. Yeah, nineteen sixty one, we have T. A. M. Craven, the FCC commissioner at the time, who said there's practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States. Wow,

that's that's really wrong. That's quite wrong. I mean they depend upon satellites now, Like without the satellites, we would not have these these services the way that we do right now. It's yeah, no, that's needless to say. Um did not stay FCC commissioner for forever. No. No. In in nineteen sixty six. Another another gem of one. Uh. This quote is from Time magazine. Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop. And again, at the time the prediction was made,

you can understand why they would say that. I mean, think about it. In nineteen sixties six, remote shopping essentially meant that you've got us years Roebuck catalogue and you placed a telephone call. Yeah, and then you would wait for something to get delivered to you. You know, all this kind of stuff. You might have C O D cash on delivery. That world. At the time, I assume they were still using like monkeys or impovertis children, mostly flying monkeys. Yeah, so, but they refused to fly when

non delivery. They said, that's just for fun Time. So yeah, the No Time magazine. The article goes on to say that, uh, I want to apologize to Lauren before I even go into this. I did not write the article, but that women really want to go to stores and try lots of stuff on and feel it with their hands, and they don't trust anything that they can't actually see or touch or hold, and therefore they would absolutely refuse out

of hand any kind of remote purchasing option for anything. Well, okay, that's that's almost half true, because it is pretty true that I want to try clothes on before I buy them, but that doesn't necessarily I mean, I mean, I have tape measures. And also that you would want to try things like hold a pot before you buy it, or rolling pin or all the other womanly things. Machine would be a big one. Now, I'm I mean, clearly, female brains are so tactile as opposed to male brains. There's

so many hard, hardwired differences between the genders. Being really sarcastic, your domesticity leanings are leave a lot to be desired learn. We gotta work on this. But yeah, no, it was. It was one of those where said that this this

idea just wasn't going to take off now. Granted again, nineteen sixty six different world from today, but of course today online shopping, this remote shopping idea is enormous, so much so that we're talking about flying drones delivering packages and impossible near future and all kinds of brick and mortar stores are being closed down right now they are

like today. So nineteen sixty six we've got a reader's Digest story where the writers predicted that we'd have jet packs by nine and cities would be climate controlled domes. I don't generally take a lot of stock and readers digest, um. I guess that this is probably one of those things where no one there had really thought about the possibility of a jet pack and how mostly you're just setting

yourself on fire constantly. Yeah, I like, uh, I always like comedy routines where they show what a jet pack would really be like, and it almost someone's just careening out of control and smashing into things at high speed and you know, there's no sense of direction. Yeah, their pants are on fire. Yeah, that's pretty accurate. Also, the idea of cities in in climate controlled domes, I mean that would be well, we did have biodome. Yeah, a little a little more modest than a city sized dome,

but yes, I'll allow it. Nineteen sixty six, we also had Arthur C. Clark making some predictions, including that by the year two thousand one, we'd have flying homes. We'd free ourselves from the grid, and our homes would be able to produce everything necess terry like water and electricity using some sort of compact power source which he had not quite defined. But that wasn't he was saying, that wasn't the point. By then we will have that, and then we'll have these flying homes. Uh. No, we don't

have flying homes. Unless your name happens to be Dorothy and there was a big storm passing through Kansas. You don't have a flying home. We also don't have that kind of power source. No. No, we have Ken Olson of Digital Equipment Corps saying there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. Now, this is seven, This is after hobbyists have already started building things like

the Altaire that was the first first hobbyist computer. The first kits were already out, I mean people one had been out and now the Apple two was coming out in seventy seven, so it's it. But yeah, it was one of those things where, I mean they were really expensive when they first came out. Computers were incredibly expensive and had really limited functionality. But still it was one of those things that caught on quick lee and never let go. So that was a very wrong prediction. One.

Here's another possibly apocryphal quote, because the person who supposedly made it denies that he ever made it. That person is Bill Gates. This is one of those ones that you see quoted all over the place, which was boils down to sixty k ought to be enough for anybody that's six of memory. Memory, yeah, which, uh, you know our phones dwarf now, so our thumb drives dwarf that, yeah, yea for storage space certainly. Yeah, yeah, you're talking about

a world of difference. But again, possibly apocryphal. Bill Gates that he never said it, So it's very possible that that's a misquote or was misattributed to Bill Gates. So one that we're pretty sure of the accuracy of one. Cellular phones will absolutely not replace local wire systems. That was Marty Cooper, who was the father of the cell phone.

If you ever heard the story worry. He worked for one company and then he made the very first cell phone call to the to the head of his opponent company. We're talking too big telecommunications companies and saying, guess where I'm calling from. I'm on the street outside your office. Yeah, but he did not foresee cell phones becoming a replacement for the local wires service. And at the time, you can understand why. I mean, the cell phones were enormous.

They had very limited range, they had limited power. Oh yeah, it was at least suitcase sized, I mean on the on the low end. Yeah, and you're talking about an infrastructure that didn't exist yet. You know, you didn't really have an infrastructure to tap into for the longest time

with cell phone service. If you can also listen to tech stuff, we have an UH podcast about mobile telephones and things like the radio service where radio telephones, which predates cell telephones, you would only be able to operate a few in a city at any given time because there just wasn't enough capacity to allow more than maybe four or five conversations going. Won't handle it, so I can kind of understand it. But obviously that one turned

out to be wrong. So scientists from the science and Technology Agency in Tokyo predicted that we'd have orbiting factories and laboratories surrounding Earth by so well, I mean we got the s S. Yeah, that's one, and some satellites and some telescopes, and in a way they do surround the Earth because they orbit it. That's a very loose

definition of surround. I think they were thinking of having large manufacturing facilities out there in space where you're not bound by the problems of gravity, which we are thinking about doing that. That that holds some promise for the future, as we have talked about, but just none of those things that's not in the near future, let alone. Todd Mill predicted that we would soon quote unquote be living in underwater cities powered by fusion and reactors with lasers.

I only wish we haven't figured out how to make the fusion work efficiently yet, although recent news have been very promising about the idea of actually producing more energy that it took to initiate the fusion reaction that was the first. But we're still waiting on making that practical so that we can actually use it as a true nuclear power source. As for underwater cities, I mean there are a ton of problems to work out. If you listen to our underwater Hotels episode, you know that we

aren't close to that yet. Yeah. There there are basically any number of land based places on Earth that are much easier and cheaper to build cities. Yeah, I mean, maybe the view isn't as pretty if you if you haven't like fishies. Robert Metcalf, who was the founder of the company three Colm and also coinvented ethernet right, says, I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and did catastrophically collapse. Yeah, so he was looking at the

Internet itself as being a bubble. Uh. If you don't, If you weren't around in the early nineties, early to mid nineties, you probably don't remember the incredible amount of hype and excitement around the Internet. It was this new tool. People weren't sure exactly how to use it. They had no idea what the the limitations or the possible applications could be. That it was really a sky's the limit

wild West frontier. Everyone try everything at once. Let's make sure you have a website that says under construction and a looping midi that you can't turn Off included on there, you know, everything looks like geo cities websites. You had people on the news having discussions about how does this email thing work? What does this? What is it? What's this weird symbol? It looks like an a in a circle?

Why is that? They're like? These were all things that were happening at this time, and so what Metcalf was saying was that all this excitement was not something that could be sustainable. Yeah, you would eventually he have a collapse. It would be similar to what we saw with the idea of virtual reality. This idea where we get a concept in our heads what virtual reality is going to be like, and when it pans out that it's not up to the same level as what our expectation was,

then it falls apart. And it wasn't that the Internet was a bad tool. It was just that once we all woke up from this hype dream, we would be disappointed and we would just walk away, never to invest again in the Internet now. He also famously said that he would eat his words if he were proven wrong. So in nineteen Metcalf delivered a speech to the WWW Conference and he brought out a printed copy of this article and a blender, and he put the article article

in the blender with some liquid. He said it on puree, poured it in a glass and drank it him. He's a man of his word. We have a quote from Clifford Stall, who was who's an astronomer, who said, well, soon buy books and newspapers straight over the internet. Sure, dismissing it. He wrote an entire book called Silicon Snake Oil where he dismissed the whole idea of the World Wide Web as a passing fad and that we would never ever get to a point where we would be

buying stuff straight off the internet. That was just ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean just like Time magazine said back in the nineteen sixties, clearly, and this entire remote shopping thing is that it's untenable. Uh he was wrong. So two thousand three spoiler at three Steve Jobs. One of the great quotes from Steve Jobs, and I could have included a ton of these. Two One was the subscription model of

buying music is bankrupt. Now in two thousand three, you're talking about an earraw when iTunes is starting to really catch on, and the idea of purchasing music on a per song basis was very popular, and so Steve Jobs was saying things like Rhapsody, where you would subscribe ride to a service and get music that way. People don't

want that, They're not going to pay for it. But now we have companies like Pandora, Spotify, r d O things that have subscription based services where you can either get something for free but you get advertising so it's ad supported, or you can opt in to purchase a an account and then get add free broadcast of whatever it is that you want. It proves that, in fact, that subscription model is not dead, it's not bankrupt. It still works. You just have to be creative in the

way that you implement it. Two thousand four, we have Bill Gates with another quote, this one not apocryphal, where he said, two years from now, spam will be solved. Thanks Bill. Yeah, man, do you remember that last time you got a spam message way back in two thousand and six? Gosh, sure is nice that I don't have a hitt and box full of them every single morning

when I log on first thing. I mean, I even have I even have notifications from my spam filter letting me know how many spam emails it caught on top of the ones that it did not, but it did not. Yeah. Yeah. Uh. Then two thousand five, Steve Chen, the co founder of YouTube, said, there's just not that many videos I want to watch. Yeah. Yeah, so, I mean YouTube clearly doesn't have any place. I mean, he co founded YouTube, but he was saying, you know,

I just don't this thing that I built. I don't know that it's really that useful because I mean, who wants to watch a little short videos all day? Yeah, he thought the service was probably going to fade away in the next couple of years. Then Google would come in two thousand and six and buy it for a cool one point six five billion dollars. So yeah, that that whole idea. And of course now we got to a point where every single minute that passes, more than

a hundred hours of footage get uploaded to YouTube. Also, we're we're on YouTube. We're on YouTube. That's true. You can watch forward thinking on YouTube. You can watch brain stuff on YouTube. We have we have shows. What are other stuff shows that are also on YouTube? So go check us out on YouTube. Hit that like button, subscribe, share it with your friends. You know the drill. So

then we have two thousand six. We have David Pogue of the New York Times who said, everyone's always asking me when Apple will come out with a cell phone. My answer is probably never. Apple came out with a cellphone the next year. Also related to that is our our final quote. This is from two thousand seven. Yes, now this is another one where you might say that bias played a role. Here's the quote, there's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.

That was Steve Balmer of Microsoft, former CEO of Microsoft at the time. He was the CEO of Microsoft. Now, again, this might have been very wishful thinking. Yeah, you if you are the head of a company that is in competition either directly or indirectly with Apple, and again you don't want to give too much credence to your competitors products.

So there may have been some posturing there. It may have been that, or maybe the bomber really did believe that the iPhone just was not going to get any kind of market share and that Windows Mobile at the time was fine. Um, it was not. Windows Mobile never really cut on to the level. It never cut onto the level of the iPhone UM. Throughout numerous overhauls of the mobile operating system strategy that Microsoft had, none of them came close to the popularity of the iPhone. I'm

not talking about the usability. If you're a Windows phone fan like you, you you love that usability, that's great. Uh you know, I I don't. I don't own an iPhone, so I don't have a dog in this fight. But you have to admit it's nowhere near as popular as the iPhone. Uh No, yeah, yeah, the the the iPhone the last time I checked, was somewhere around yeah market.

When you look at it and you think this is one line of phones, even if you divide it up into the various moderations, Yeah, it's still one line of phones. Whereas andre wid you could say, yeah, but Android's got a majority share. Yeah, but no one Android phone has majority that's spread out over manufacturer, let alone models exactly. So yeah, interesting stuff. Well, obviously there are way more predictions. I mean, people say dumb stuff all the time, listen

to our podcast for example. But yeah, there's so many other predictions we could have included on this. We hope that Joe when he comes back will not be too upset that we've done this one. We'll just make sure that we've marked these particular predictions down as ones we've already covered, and maybe in a future episode will look

at some others. So if you have any thoughts of things we should cover on this show, maybe you want us to talk about really prescient predictions, things that actually came true, things that people could not possibly have anticipated and yet predicted. Let us know. We'll do an episode about that too. That'd be a lot of fun. You can let drop us a line. Our email address is FW thinking at discovery dot com, or let us know on social media. We're on Facebook, we're on the Twitter,

We're on the Google Plus. Our handle is FW thinking and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go Places,