Famous Historical Quotes About Disruptive Technologies That Proved to Be False

“How, sir, would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I pray you, excuse me, I have not the time to listen to such nonsense.”
– Napoleon Bonapart telling American inventor Robert Fulton who designed, built, and demonstrated the Nautilus, the first practical submarine in history, 1800

“What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?”
– The Quarterly Review, March edition, 1825

“Dear Mr. President: The canal system of this country is being threatened by a new form of transportation known as railroads. As you may well know, Mr. President, ‘railroad’ carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles per hour by ‘engines’ which, in addition to endangering life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside, setting fire to crops, scaring the livestock and frightening women and children. The Almighty certainly never intended that people should travel at such breakneck speed.”
– Martin Van Buren, President of the United States, 1833

“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, French surgeon, 1839.

“Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.”
– Associates of Edwin L. Drake refusing his suggestion to drill for crude oil in 1859

“Well-informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires. Even if it were, it would be of no practical value.”
—Boston Post, 1865“

Never use an electrical device if you can find a mechanical one. Electricity is mighty uncertain stuff to work with.”—Advice of a noted inventor to Watson, 1872

“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”
– Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, British Post Office, 1878

“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”
– Lord Kelvin, British mathematician, and physicist, president of the British Royal Society, 1895

Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical (sic) and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.”
– Simon Newcomb, New York Times, 1901

“The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad.”
– The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903

“Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.”
– Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies, 1918

“The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in particular?”
– Associates of David Sarnoff responding to the latter’s call for investment in the radio in 1921.

“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.”
– Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer, and inventor of the electronic vacuum tube, 1926

“That Professor Goddard with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react–to say that would be absurd. Of course, he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”
— 1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard’s revolutionary invention of the rocket.

“Atomic energy might be as good as our present-day explosives, but it is unlikely to produce anything very much more dangerous.
– Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister, 1939.

Whatever happens, the U.S. Navy is not going to be caught napping.
– Frank Knox, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, on December 4, 1941, three days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

You better get secretarial work or get married.”
– Emmeline Snively, director of the Blue Book Book Modelling Agency, advising would-be model Marilyn Monroe in 1944

“This is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.”
– Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy during World War II, advising President Truman on the secret development of the atom bomb, 1945

“The Japanese don’t make anything the people in the U.S. would want.”
-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, 1954

“We will bury you.”
– Nikita Krushchev, Soviet Premier, at the United Nations predicting how Soviet Communism will win over U.S. capitalism, 1958

“There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.”
– T. Craven, FCC Commissioner, in 1961

“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.”
— Decca Recording Co. Executive Dick Row, rejecting the Beatles, 1962

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
—Ken Olson, Founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

“Bitcoin: It’s a fraud” and “worse than tulip bulbs”
– Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, 2017

“Bitcoin, stay away from it. It’s a mirage, basically. In terms of cryptocurrencies, generally, I can say almost with certainty that they will come to a bad ending.”
—Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, 2019