Utter bilge
About
The late SF author G. Harry Stine had a collection of quotes about how this or that technology now commonly in use would never work or never be useful. [1][2] It was called the "utter bilge" file after one of the quotes, "Space travel is utter bilge."
I've never seen all the quotes in one place, especially not online (excepting informal collections sometimes circulated in email and newsgroups), so I'm going to start collecting those I come across until I have enough of them to be worth moving to Issuepedia.
Quotes
"Space travel is utter bilge." — astronomer Sir Richard Wooley (also given as Sir Richard Van Der Riet Wolley [3]), 1956 [4]
"Very interesting, Whittle my dear boy, but it will never work". — said to the future Sir Frank Whittle, inventor of the modern aircraft jet engine, by his supervisor at Manchester University, upon viewing Whittle's original jet engine design [5]
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." — Ken Olsen, CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, presumably 1980 [6]
Links
- 2013-12-24 Television: flash in the pan
- 2011-08-27 And the Nostradamus Award Goes To... Clifford Stoll said a number of things in 1995, including:
- "The truth is, no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher, and no computer network will change the way government works."
- "Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure."
- (Stoll, at least, has admitted how incredibly wrong he was -- partly because technology moved fast enough to prove this in a mere 15 years or less.)
- 2010-09-16
- Zeros to heroes: The man who learned to fly: "During the 18th and 19th centuries, scientists and the public all believed that it was not only impossible to fly using an artificial wing, but an act of folly to suggest that you could. This did not discourage the English gentleman scientist George Cayley, even though his contemporaries - including his own son - were embarrassed by his efforts."
- Zeros to heroes: The tragic fate of a genetic pioneer: this one's a little complicated. In 1926, Paul Kammerer makes observations which appear to support Lamarckianism. Kammerer was prominently condemned as a fraud (reason not stated), and killed himself six weeks later. In 1971 Arthur Koestler argues that Kammerer's experiments may have been tampered with for political reasons. In 2009, Alex Vargas reexamines Kammerer's work and pronounces it not fraudulent at all, but actually consistent with the then-undiscovered field of epigenetics.
- Zeros to heroes: The long wait to speak in code: inventions can be discovered long before the technology exists to implement them. Also, being a mystical kook doesn't automatically invalidate one's inventions, even if the technology doesn't yet exist to implement them.
Notes
Need to track down this quote: "I would sooner believe that two Yankee professors had lied than believe that rocks can fall out of the sky." (one usage here, from 1999, but no source)
Also, are there any choice quotations about the impossibility of continental drift?