For as long as humanity has had the ability to think, there has been a tendency to engage in speculation about what the future will be like. Though we are encouraged to live for the day, carpe diem, most of us have, at the very least, a sneaking desire to know what awaits us in years to come. I don’t read horoscopes or go to fortune tellers but I know of many intelligent, and very sensible, people who do.

As any student of history will tell you, those who were seen as wisest were not averse to making predictions although I accept, mistranslation and interpretation has been used to foresee cataclysmic events such as wars and the rise of tyrants. However, some who have made predictions appear to have been uncannily right. Nostradamus, for example, the sixteenth century philosopher is credited with forecasting the two world wars. The trouble is that many believe that his quatrains, which are verses or poems, predicted a third world war which, apparently, should have happened already.

Making apocalyptic predictions is fascinating though clearly fraught with danger. Equally interesting are the technological predictions that have been made by those who, because of their superior intellect and incredible imagination, were able to foresee the development of products that would have seemed utterly incredible at the time, a good example of which would be the drawings of, Leonardo da Vinci.

It is his predictions about future technological development that are really interesting. One example is his fascination with the ability of humans to fly.

Da Vinci wrote that: “..once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return”. Among the numerous drawings he made there are over one hundred dedicated to his thoughts on devices that would allow flight. Among them was the ornithopter, a flying machine which looks like what we would recognise as a helicopter. The first flight took place in 1907 when Frenchman Louis Charles Berguet who developed a prototype gyroplane which remained above the ground for just over a minute.

Among the many other things Da Vinci predicted in his drawings were submarines. Interestingly, the French science fiction writer Jules Verne used the idea of an underwater electrically powered vessel in his book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870. He didn’t have to wait too long to see an example in action as one was invented by the French civil Engineer Claude Goubet in 1885. Whilst there are a multitude of other examples of technological predictions which were equally prescient, it is those that did not come to fruition which are particularly worthy of attention. The development of computers brought a rash of what proved to be ill-judged prophecies. In 1943 Thomas Watson, then chairman of IBM, stated that there would be a world market for no more than five. And in 1968 an engineer in the Advanced Computer Systems of IBM, when asked about his thoughts on the potential of the microchip, asked what they could possibly be good for?

Notably, in 1977 Ken Olsson the chairman and founder of Digital Equipment stated his belief that there was “no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” And though Bill Gates, who made billions out of his developments of operating systems for computers and was turned down by Atari and Hewlett Packard with his ideas, even he was found to be fallible when in 1982 he confidently predicted: “We will never make a 32 bit operating system.”

Gates is not the only person with ‘good’ ideas to have been found to have proved mistaken. Albert Einstein, widely acknowledged as a brilliant thinker on theoretical physics, claimed in 1932 that there was “not the slightest chance” of nuclear energy ever being obtained. But Einstein wasn’t the first scientist to do this. Lord Kelvin of the Royal Society had stated in 1883 that “X-rays will prove to be a hoax”, and in 1895 that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible”. Let’s not forget that in 1889 the influential scientist, inventor and businessmen Thomas Edison, in an attempt to undermine his great rival George Westinghouse, asserted that “fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever”.

Many have confidently predicted that we are at the end of developing new technology or, indeed, that it is not possible to discover new knowledge. Charles H. Duell, who was the Commissioner of the US Office of Patents, in 1899 stated his belief that “everything that can be invented has been invented”. 

Perhaps he’s heard what Simon Newcome, an astronomer, had said in 1888: “We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.”

It would indeed now be a strange world without Professor Brian Cox telling us about the wonders of the universe!

The desire to travel into space has long fascinated us and many have mused about how we would achieve it. That said, many have claimed it would never be possible to develop the sort of rocket technology to allow us to leave the earth’s atmosphere. In 1921 a New York Times editorial stated that “Professor Goddard [who was developing such technology] does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools”.

Even as late as 1957 Sir Harold Spencer Jones, who was Astronomer Royal for Britain, made plain his view of space travel – “bunk.” This was only two weeks before the launch of the first Russian Sputnik. And in 1967 Dr Lee De Forest, who had made his reputation as the inventor of the vacuum tube and father of television, suggested that it would be impossible for man to ever reach the moon, “regardless of all future scientific advances”.

Among the erroneous predictions made is a 1876 Western Union internal memo which stated that “this ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us”. It is easy in retrospect to see some suggestions for the future as being utterly ludicrous. Included are the nuclear powered vacuum cleaner (1955), robot pets (1974), and in 1966, the belief by that most famous futurologist Arthur C. Clarke that houses would be capable of flying by 2001. Clarke also believed that entire communities would migrate in harmony with the seasons. Perhaps one of the best-known mistaken forecasts was that made by Roger Smith, chairman of General Motors when in 1986 he stated his belief that computers would herald a “paperless society” by the year 2000.

The examples described demonstrate the dangers of making predictions concerning the future. But, as we know, many organisations pay incredible sums of money for those considered adept at strategic decision-making; effectively making predictions. Given that many incredibly intelligent people have been proved so wrong in the past probably means that we should not be surprised when business executives make decisions based on their assumptions and beliefs about the future which also turn out to be spectacularly mistaken. 

* Dr Steven McCabe is director of research degrees for Birmingham City Business School