Incorrect predictions

After the rocket quits our air and really starts on its longer journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left.

— Incorrect predictions

To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth—all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances.

— Incorrect predictions

What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?

— Incorrect predictions

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.

— Incorrect predictions

There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.

— Incorrect predictions

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.

— Incorrect predictions

But the real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets. Because no matter how inexpensive the machines become, and no matter how sophisticated their software, I still can't imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing.

— Incorrect predictions

Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it.

— Incorrect predictions

With over fifteen types of foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn't likely to carve out a big share of the market for itself.

— Incorrect predictions

Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires as may be done with dots and dashes of Morse code, and that, were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.

— Incorrect predictions

Every attempt to refer chemical questions to mathematical doctrines must be considered, now and always, profoundly irrational, as being contrary to the nature of the phenomena. . . . but if the employment of mathematical analysis should ever become so preponderant in chemistry (an aberration which is happily almost impossible) it would occasion vast and rapid retrogradation....

— Incorrect predictions

Democracy will be dead by 1950.

— Incorrect predictions

The coming of the wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous.

— Incorrect predictions

No "scientific bad boy" ever will be able to blow up the world by releasing atomic energy.

— Incorrect predictions

I do not myself think that any civilized nation will torpedo unarmed and defenceless merchant ships.

— Incorrect predictions

In the victory of the immortal ideas of Communism we see the future of our country

— Incorrect predictions