(Looking back at the future- It ain't what it used to be!)

Here are some quotes from the 1850s through the 1980s about the future.  These have been pulled from a variety of magazines and other publications for your enjoyment.  Some of these are absolutely hilarious:

• On oil:  ''Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy.''
  -- Workers to railroad conductor Edwin Drake before he drilled the first
  successful U.S. oil, 1859
• On the Telephone:  ''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.'' -- Boston Post, 1865
• On Inventions:  ''Everything that can be invented has been invented.'' -- Charles Duell, director
  of the U.S. Patent Office, 1899
• On aircraft:  ''Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.'' -- Lord Kelvin of the British
  Royal Society, one of the 19th century's top experts on thermodynamics, 1890s
• On the End of the World:  ''The world is coming to an end in 1950.'' -- Historian Henry Adams, 1903
• On Nuclear Power: ''There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom.'' -- Nobel
  Prize-winning physicist Robert Milliken, 1923
• On the Movies:  ''Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?'' -- H.M. Warner, Warner Bros., 1927
• On Space Travel:  ''A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth's atmosphere.'' -- The New York Times, 1936
• On Computers: 
  • ''I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.'' -- IBM's Thomas
    Watson, 1943.
  • ''There is no need for any individual to have a computer in their home.'' -- Ken
    Olson, president of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.
  • ''640K (kilobytes of memory) ought to be enough for anybody.'' -- Microsoft's Bill Gates, 1981.  Today computers now offer more than 50,000 times that much memory.
• On Television:  ''Television won't last because people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.'' -- Producer Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, 1946
• On Smoking:  ''If excessive smoking actually plays a role in the production of lung cancer, it seems to be a minor one.'' -- W.C. Heuper, National Cancer Institute, 1954
• On Life: "You ain't going nowhere, son. You ought to go back to driving a truck.'' -- The
  Grand Ole Opry's Jim Denny to Elvis Presley, 1954
• On Politics:  ''By 2000, politics will simply fade away. We will not see any political parties.''
  -- Visionary and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller, 1966

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  This page was last updated on 12/18/2003 .