Here they are. I'd read most of them before, but it's nice to have them all in one place. They're missing Vannevar Bush's quote about ICBMs.

Intercontinental guided missiles, Bush contends, need not be feared at all—at least for the present. "It can be done . . . [but] its cost would be astronomical. As a means of carrying high explosive or any toxic substitute, therefore, it is a fantastic proposal. It would never stand the test of cost analysis."

Here's another one we hear all the time: "Who would want to pay many thousands of dollars to go into space? Perhaps a few will, just to be the first, but it will just be a passing fad."

[Via Geek Press]

Bush never said that ICBMs were technically impossible, only that they would be so expensive that they would not pass a cost-benefit test. That's not an outrageous prediction to make in 1949. After all, that was prior to the breakthrough in hydrogen bombs (which allowed smaller rockets). He also did not realize how much the United States (or the Soviets) was willing to spend on ICBMs. So he was wrong, yes, but it's not an egregious mistake.

The bigger problem I see with the other predictions is when somebody makes a statement that something will "never" happen. If you predict that something will not happen for decades, then if it happens fifty years later, you're not really wrong. But "never" is a long time.

You are really only on safe ground saying that it will never happen when something clearly violates the laws of physics. The laws of engineering, economics, politics and other human factors can be bent and modified, which is why airplanes carrying more than 10 people eventually got built.

I do have some quibbles about the list. Some of the things on there are either not predictions, or are clearly hyperbole. For instance, the claim that cassettes would "kill the music industry" was clearly a marketing campaign, where it is common to exaggerate the threat in order to scare people to do what you want. Happens in Hollywood all the time: movies were going to kill theater, television was going to kill movies, pirated DVDs were going to kill both, and now there's going to be a writer's strike because the lack of royalties on DVDs and the internet are doing bad things. The music industry was the same way: recordings were going to kill live performances, and then home cassettes were going to new music. Everybody complains and then something changes (a lot or a little) and things continue in a modified form. Tower Records could not compete with Amazon.com, and so they folded, but at some point Netflix is not going to mail out disks anymore but only shoot electrons through wires. The market will transform, fracture, change, but it won't completely go away.

Finally, I'd note that Van Buren was not claiming that railroads were impossible, only that they were bad. That's an opinion, not a prediction. And as governor of a state that had invested a lot of money in the Erie Canal, he had a reason to oppose railroads in favor of canals.

Kevin Randle wrote:
"You are really only on safe ground saying that it will never happen when something clearly violates the laws of physics."

Ah, but our "laws" of physics --or at least their precision, our interpretation, and/or our understanding of them-- constantly change (I blame the scientific method! /joke ^_^), sometimes enough to change almost everything we thought was true. You went on to mention airplanes and they're a perfect example of a technology that many well-respected and highly educated scientists doomed as "against physics" early on.

We know better now but wouldn't have back then. When we laugh at them we laugh at ourselves (and that's a Good ThingTM).

Einstein was no fool yet he's on the list, even the best among us can be plain wrong. We should try not to underestimate how little we might know (likely unavoidable but nevertheless something to be aware of).

"Man will not fly for fifty years."

---Wilbur Wright, 1901

The quoted comment from Bush was correct! It didn't make sense to use ICBMs to deliver chemical or high explosive weapons. It still doesn't.

Now, nuclear weapons, particularly beyond the first generation atomic bombs Bush was familiar with, are a different story. But the comment was clearly crafted to exclude nukes.

I see that you are far more likely to get on this list if you say something is impossible than if you say something is possible. Unless you are gung-ho about nuclear powered vacuum cleaners, that is.

Failed predictions of technological success are too common to be noteworthy. Most new products fail in the marketplace, and few markets tolerate more than a few successful technologies -- the best push the also-rans into niches, or extinction.

Nuclear powered vacuums violate the laws of physics, thus there will never be a device created with which to clean them.

Any vaccum cleaner plugged into the grid fed by a nuclear power plant could be arguesd to be a nuke powered vaccum cleaner.