10 Most Famous Failed Predictions of all Time

[MrScorpio]

http://listphobia.com/2009/12/20/10-most-famous-failed-predictions-of-all-time/


“It will be years not in my time before a woman will become Prime Minister.”
Margaret Thatcher, October 26th, 1969.

[old mark]

1. Karl Rove around 2001 called for a "permanent Republican Majority", a phrase that was

also used by Newt G and Tom DeLay.
Rove later denied he said it, or at least that he didn't mean "permanent" but only 20 or 30 years...he stated that the 'publican dynasty would be comparable in length to FDR's presidency and influence, and counter the effects of it...so I'm guessing they want to go back to the late 1920's and early 1930's and take us all with them.

Fat fucking chance, Karl.

mark

[applegrove]

9. I remember that.

[BlueCollar]

14. Cheney quote

"My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." –Vice President Dick Cheney, "Meet the Press," March 16, 2003

[SCantiGOP]

17. another good Cheney statement

From the second year they were in office: "Quite frankly, deficits don't matter" (that is, unless we have a Democratic President and then they are evidence that he is a foreign born socialist trying to destroy the country.)

[TZ]

18. Almost as good as Wolfowitz saying the war would pay for itself

and be over in a matter of WEEKS.

[dimbear]

2. Wow. My list would be way different.

I would start with "The Third Reich will last a thousand years." Follow that up with " There are some standing here who will not taste death....."

My favorite lite side prediction: "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dis............"

[Tom_Foolery]

3. Everything that can be invented has been invented...

Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899 (attributed)

[nomorenomore08]

4. Fuck you, Maggie!

Sorry, I saw the picture and I just had to say that... :shrug:

[LeftishBrit]

5. Euurrrrggghhhh! You should have warned me about that image!

[Bucky]

6. I'd tap it.

Just sayin'

[liberaltrucker]

11. Self delete

Posted while intoxicated (PWI)

Sorry.

:blush:

[Arugula Latte]

23. Would you have to lie back and think of England to do so?

[Odin2005]

7. That is exactly why I make fun of the peak oil doomers and the folks that...

...think sapient AI is impossible and colonizing space is impossible.

Impossible is Nothing.

"If an expert says something is possible, he is almost certainly correct, if an expert says something is impossible he is almost certainly wrong"

-Albert Einstein

[Stuart G]

8. A great failed prediction from the NYTimes..1939

The average American family hasn’t time for television.—New York Times, 1939

[applegrove]

10. "The end of history". I forget who said that... one of the neocons.

[Art_from_Ark]

21. That was Francis Fukuyama

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man

[Rochester]

12. The one about how there would be not more than a dozen or so computers nationwide

(I forget who said it or when or in what context)

[ProfessorGAC]

36. That Was The Head Of IBM

Watson was, i think his name.

They were, of course, making punch card machines, sorting machines, and filing machines, so the last thing he wanted to see succeed was a true computer.

Not sure if he was actually predicting anything or if that was just wishful thinking.
GAC

[sakabatou]

13. I got one!

Jesus said that he'd return before his disciples can preach throughout Israel (Matt.10:23).

[WinkyDink]

15. I believe Neville Chamberlain owns this thread.

[av8rdave]

16. Don't forget Reagan saying the economy would outgrow the deficit

Or the Bush cabal saying the Iraq war would pay for itself.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

19. These so called experts!!!

Some gems from William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824-1907):

"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now, All that remains is more and more precise measurement."

"X-rays will prove to be a hoax."

"Radio has no future."

"The more thoroughly I conduct scientific research, the more I believe that science excludes atheism." (I think they are entirely separate fields, but that's just my opinion.)

Writing to Niagara Falls Power Company: "Trust you will avoid the gigantic mistake of alternating current."


I wonder if he started making refrigerators after he retired? Kelvinators??? :rofl:

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Albert A. Michelson (1852-1931) said in 1894,
“The most important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplemented by new discoveries is exceedingly remote.”

(The guy in the Michelson-Morley experiment.) This was only 11 years before the Miraculous Year of Albert Einstein's papers on relativity, 1905.

[Odin2005]

34. Kelvin was the king of arrogant blowhards.

When the geological evidence showed that the Earth was almost certainly older than the 20 million years proclaimed by Lord Kelvin a truly objective scientist would have hypothesized that there was an undiscovered source of heat keeping the Earth warm, but Kelvin insisted that the geologists had to be wrong. Typical arrogant physicist that cannot accept that biologists and geologists are equal to physicists.

[nolabear]

20. My mother once had a book by "Criswell"

in which he predicted that the city of Denver would be turned by aliens into a giant pudding.

No, right?

[Angleae]

22. A few other gems.

We will bury you - Nikita Krushchev, 1958
Everything that can be invented has been invented - Charles H. Duell, U.S. Patent Office, 1899
It will be gone by June - Variety magazine, on rock and roll, 1955
Read my lips: NO NEW TAXES - George HW Bush, 1988
This is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time – Neville Chamberlain, 1938
Man will not fly for 50 years - Wilbur Wright, 1903
There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction - Gen. Tommy Franks, 2003

[Arugula Latte]

24. The Titanic won't sink.

[Sweet Charming Dem]

25. Well, honestly, the world could have done without *that* woman becoming Prime Minister

[RFKHumphreyObama]

27. Thank you. You said what I was trying to but couldn't get the right words

And welcome to DU!

[Sweet Charming Dem]

28. Thanks!

[HEyHEY]

26. "We are so gonna get laid"

16-year-old guys every Friday night.

[HughBeaumont]

29. Mine -

"Just another bunch of noise, copying other people's music . . . this band is going nowhere" - Joe Meek, on a then-unknown group called The Beatles.

Joe also passed on working with a sax player named David Jones . . . you know, that guy who, about 7 years later changed his name to Bowie.

John Repsch, in The Legendary Joe Meek recounts that upon hearing Rod Stewart sing, Meek rushed into the studio, put his fingers in his ears and screamed until Stewart had left. He preferred to record instrumentals with the band he sang with - The Moontrekkers.

Sad.

[The Midway Rebel]

30. If war erupts, we will be able to wipe up all of the spilled blood with a handkerchief.

An Alabama politician, Leroy Pope Walker, actually said something along these lines proir to outbreak the American Civil War.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

31. Some time in the mid 1990s, I read an article about how major Japanese companies

were sending representatives to the ten to twenty largest cities in China to set up shop.

The article quoted an American businessman as saying, "That's ridiculous. No one is going to be making any money in China for twenty years."

[Lydia Leftcoast]

32. Speaking of scary right-wing women

during the 1980s, Jeane Kirkpatrick was going around telling everyone that there was a difference between totalitarian countries (which, for her, included Russia, China, Cuba, and believe it or not, Nicaragua) and authoritarian countries (all the right-wing dictatorships that the Reagan administration supported).

She claimed that "authoritarian" countries gradually evolved into democracies, while "totalitarian" countries would never change.

The 1980s were not over when the Soviet Union broke up and China went capitalist. Meanwhile, most of the Latin American right-wing countries dumped their "authoritarian" governments in popular uprisings or coups.

She continued spouting right-wing nonsense till she died, but I never heard a single journalist remind her of her spectacularly failed predictions from the 1980s.

[Crankie Avalon]

33. "We'll be greeted as liberators."

With flowers and chocolates, etc.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

35. about the beatles and other musicians.

Theirs is a happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless brand of harmonic primitivism... In the Liverpudlian repertoire, the indulgent amateurishness of the musical material, though closely rivaled by the indifference of the performing style, is actually surpassed only by the ineptitude of the studio production method. (Strawberry Fields suggests a chance encounter at a mountain wedding between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug band)
- Glenn Gould


Chet Huntley, NBC Evening News on February 7, 1964:

Like a good little news organization, we sent three cameramen out to Kennedy airport today to cover the arrival of a group from England known as the Beatles. However, after surveying the film our men return with, and the subject of that film, I feel there is absolutely no need to show any of that film.


New York World Telegram Editorial on February 8, 1964:

Having got rich off “teen-age lunacy” in their home stompings, these fantastic characters now have come to tap the jackpot - New York, Washington, Miami, American television. Their shrewdness in assaying a market is evidenced by the 4000 screaming, hookey-playing school-age adulators who swooned all over the airport when the Beatles arrived in New York.

These lads cultivate a vague allusion to being musicians, in a gurgling sort of way. They tote instruments, but blandly assure their fans they know not a note. (All their notes are in the bank.) Their production seems to be a haunting combination of rock ‘n’ roll, the shimmy, a hungry cat riot, and Fidel Castro on a harangue.


Anthony Burton, New York Daily News on February 11, 1964:

It’s a relief from Cyprus and Malaysia and Viet Nam and racial demonstrations and Khrushchev. Best by troubles all around the globe, America has turned to the four young men with the ridiculous hair-cuts for a bit of light entertainment.

The Beatles know it. They know it’s a lot of nonsense and refuse to take themselves with the seriousness of those all around them . . . In another month America will have had its giggle and once more will be worrying about Castro and Khrushchev.


Newsweek on February 24, 1964:

Visually they are a nightmare: tight, dandified Edwardian beatnik suits and great pudding-bowls of hair. Musically they are a near disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of yeah, yeah, yeah!) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of valentine-card romantic sentiments.
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Fausto Torrefranca, 1912 --writing about Puccini's operas: Tosca was smutty and "French," Madame Butterfly "superficial," and La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) "international and insincere. "

"'Tosca' is a shabby little shocker." -- Joseph Kerman, 1900

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Max Reger's reply to a critic:

Composer Max Reger famously wrote to Dr. Rudolph Louis, a critic for the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten who had published a bad review on February 7, 1906 : “I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me!”


============
About Tchaikovsky -- "We see plainly the savage vulgar faces, we hear curses, we smell vodka. … Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto gives us for the first time the hideous notion that there can be music that stinks to the ear."

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The ultimate book of bad music reviews is THE LEXICON OF MUSICAL INVECTIVE, by Nicolas Slonimsky.

I had the honor of playing under his direction when I was going to the University of Houston in 1974. We performed Three Places in New England by Charles Ives.