One of my favorite things about the New Year's celebrations has always been picking up an issue of The Star, the world's most reliable source for news and information, and seeing the predictions for the coming year. Well, the world didn't end in 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001 or 2003 like it had predicted in the past, but damn did we ever come close! Anyway, here are a few other failed predictions that you might enjoy.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates 1981

"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." - Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943.

"It will be years -- not in my time -- before a woman will become Prime Minister." - Margaret Thatcher, 1974.

"Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be hoax." - English scientist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, 1988.

"By 2000, the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy." - Time Magazine, 1966.

"I'm so healthy I expect to live on and on." - Health guru J.I. Rodale, moments before he dropped dead during a taping of the Dick Cavell Show, 1971.

"There will never be a bigger plane built." - A Boeing engineer, after the first flight of the 247, a twin-engine plane that carried 10 people.

"It's a bad joke that won't last. Not with winter coming." - Fashion designer CoCo Chanel on the miniskirt, 1966.

"Television won't matter in your lifetime or mine." - Rex Lambert, 1936.

"Law will be simplified (over the next century). Lawyers will have diminished, and their fees will have been vastly curtailed." - Julius Henri Browne, Journalist, 1893.

"While theoretically and technically feasible television may be, commercially and financially it is an impossibility." - Lee DeForest, Inventor.

"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." - Marechal Ferdinand Foch, French Professor of Military Strategy. (Figures!)

"We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy." - Simon Newcomb, astronomer, 1888.

"By the year 2000 there will be pills that cure phobias. Fear of heights, crowds, strangers, elevators, closed-in-places, even fear of flying will be a phobia of the past." - Marvin Cetron and Thomas O'Toole, "Encounters with the Future," 1982.

"The phonograph has no commercial value at all." - Thomas Edison.

"It will be gone by June." - Entertainment newspaper on Rock 'n' Roll, 1955.


staff out...

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