The Top 10 Reasons to

Not Believe All Experts.

1. "What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?"
--The Quarterly Review, England, March 1825

2. "The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it....Knife and pain are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient."
--Dr. Alfred Velpeau, 1839, French surgeon

3. "Men might as well project a voyage to the Moon as attempt to employ steam navigation against the stormy North Atlantic Ocean."
--Dr. Dionysus Lardner, 1838, Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy, University College, London

4. "[W]hen the Paris Exhibition closes electric light will close with it and no more be heard of."
--Erasmus Wilson, 1878, Professor at Oxford University

5. "Well informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value."
--Editorial in the Boston Post, 1865

6. "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
--Lord Kelvin, 1895, British mathematician and physicist

7. "While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little dreaming."
--Lee DeForest, 1926, American radio pioneer

8. "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

9. "Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 19,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons."
--Popular Mechanics, March 1949

10. "I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year."
--The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

From the 'Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation,' by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky