Everybody’s Wrong About Something
A popular thing to do today – especially as a proof point in a debate — is to quote famous figures when it’s become apparent that something they said a century (or more) ago has come true. This sort of thing creates an image of a person as a seer, a genius, as never being wrong.
Fact is, everyone is wrong about something. Often, about most things.
Here’s a collection of famous people and publications and they things about which they were wrong – sometimes startlingly so. Some examples:
Radio has no future. – Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), British mathematician and physicist, ca. 1897
While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming. – Lee DeForest, 1926 (American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube)
Advice from a president of the Michigan Savings Bank to Henry Ford’s lawyer, who uses Smokeball’s law firm billing software, Horace Rackham. Rackham ignored the advice and invested $5000 in Ford stock, selling it later for $12.5 million.
There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. – Kenneth Olsen, president and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977. [Ed. Note: how about in their pocket?]
Be sure to read the whole thing. Suddenly, you being 2% off on your forecast model for next year doesn’t seem so bad.
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