‘Never’ is a dangerous word to use

Just to have some fun, here are some predictions by more or less famous people about all sorts of things. One thing this list teaches us is to be careful when saying “never”! When I wrote an article on the death of the PC, several people shot back at me that the PC would never die. Well. Let’s look at some predictions that were way off target.

Let’s start with flying. Wilbur Wright, who with his brother Orville managed their first successful flight in 1903, just two years before was positive that man would not fly for another 50 years. Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society, was sure in 1895 that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible.

Thomas Edison, American inventor, stated in 1895 that it was apparent to him that the possibilities of the airplane had been exhausted and that one should turn elsewhere. Wrong!

As for cars, Business Week decided in 1968 that Japanese cars were unlikely to carve out a big share of the American market for themselves. Ah, oops. And here is somebody who must have kicked himself in later years. The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advised Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Company in 1903 as the horse was definitely here to stay and the car but a fad.

The Scientific American maintained that the car had practically reached the limit of its development in 1909, and in 1899 the Literary Digest put its money on the bicycle being more popular than the horseless carriage.

So what did people have to say about computers? Popular Mechanics decided in 1949 that the computer in the future may have only 1 000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1,5 tons. Ken Olsen, president, chairperson and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, maker of big-business mainframe computers, couldn’t see any reason for anyone wanting a computer in their home.

Then there was the editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall who in 1957 felt quite strongly that data processing was a fad and wouldn’t last out the year. Robert Lloyd, an IBM executive, couldn’t quite work out what the microprocessor was useful for in 1968. That’s the bit that is at the heart of the modern computer.

Some wise person at Western Union decided in a memo that the telephone was not going to be of any value to the company. That was in 1878. As for the chief engineer at the British Post Office, he thought only the Americans would need a telephone. After all, the Brits had loads of messenger boys to do the same job!

In the US, President Hayes in 1876 thought the telephone was a great invention but he couldn’t quite work out who would want to use it. In 1868, the New York papers reported on the arrest of some poor, ill-informed person who was trying to sell shares in his company so that he could develop the telephone. As if the human voice could be conveyed any distance over metallic wires! Heaven forbid.

What about television? A movie producer, Darryl Zanuck, thought that people would get bored staring at a plywood box every night — did he get that one wrong. And a radio pioneer, Lee DeForest, was sure that commercially and financially the TV was an impossibility and in his words “a development of which we need waste little time dreaming”.

Space travel has also had its share of disbelief. Sir Harold Spencer Jones, astronomer royal of the UK, in 1957 considered space travel to be bunk. This was a mere two weeks before the Russian space vehicle Sputnik orbited the Earth. Then the same Lee DeForest, opening his mouth again to change feet, felt that any kind of man-made space voyage would never occur and was worthy of wild dreams of science-fiction writers.

And for a final example of how silly it is to pronounce a “never” statement, the light bulb, of all things, had its fair share of detractors. Again the Brits felt that the Americans could do with light bulbs, but it was definitely unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men in the UK. Henry Morton, president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, was also convinced that the light bulb was a conspicuous failure.

It will be interesting to see how many of our gadgets that we are so comfortable with right now, such as cellphones, TVs, computers, digital cameras and so forth, will be the same in 10 or 20 years’ time. Will we be using trains, motor cars or airplanes to travel from A to B or will we be jumping into hovering pods to go to travel centres where we can teleport to other planets to visit relatives and friends?

Will we have chips implanted in our wrists, for instance, that allow us to dial up to friends with similar chips in their wrists? Will we have plants that talk to us, reminding us to water them? What about clothes that automatically adapt to temperature changes so that we don’t need to take coats and scarves any more?

Whether any of these will happen time will tell. What will be certain, though, is that a whole bunch of people will have many “nevers” to say. Even supposedly clever and highly educated people will throw those nevers out at will. So if you feel the computer will never die, don’t feel bad if some totally new gadget replaces it. You are bound to have been in good “never” company.