10 of the Worst Predictions in History

"THE INTERNET WILL SOON... CATASTROPHICALLY COLLAPSE"

1995 was a big year for sweeping statements about the early Internet by networking professionals. Unlike Cliff Stoll, however, Bob Metcalfe wasn't content with denying that the Internet would ever be a useful place to do business.

Metcalfe, an electrical engineer widely credited with the invention of Ethernet technology, used his column in InfoWorld to argue against the idea that the Internet would just keep growing forever.

He stated, "I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse." It wasn't clear what the Internet "going supernova" would actually mean in a non-astrophysical context, but Metcalfe was so certain of it, he promised to eat his words if he was proven wrong.

In 1999, while addressing the sixth World Wide Web conference, he dutifully blended a copy of his article into a pulpy liquid and chugged it onstage, suggesting that while Metcalfe may have been a brilliant engineer, he never really understood how metaphors worked.

"THE Y2K PROBLEM IS THE ELECTRONIC EQUIVALENT OF THE EL NIÑO"

The Y2K or Millennium Bug had been a topic of discussion among computer scientists since 1985, when it became obvious that this whole computer thing wasn't just a passing fad and that we'd probably still be using them by January 1, 2000.

What was less obvious was exactly what would happen as a consequence of computers suddenly believing it was 1900 (and also forgetting it was a leap year) and that proved fertile ground for alarmists and opportunists of all stripes from survivalist suppliers eager to sell you a year's worth of canned chicken to John Hamre (the United States Deputy Secretary of Defense and the first to equate Y2K with that other terrifying thing from the 90s we've all forgotten about, El Niño).

In the end, the only visible consequence of the Y2K "crisis" was an NBC TV movie that was bad even by TV-movie standards.

"APPLE IS ALREADY DEAD"

Forecasting the death of Apple Computers is a sort of cottage industry in tech and business news. An artifact of its legendarily rocky run up until the return of messianic alpha CEO Steve Jobs.

Jobs' return didn't put an end to any of these predictions and his then-controversial i-products led to a new storm of articles about how insane anyone would be to design a computer without a floppy drive, or a music player that costs $300, or a telephone that some weirdo could browse the Internet on.

Even today, years after Jobs' death, TheStreet tech columnist referred to the company's recent stock option decisions in an article unequivocally titled "There's No Question Now: Apple is Dead."

While Apple has certainly fumbled badly under the guidance of CEO Tim Cook, it's hard to believe Americans will ever stop paying way too much money for shiny off-white lozenge-shaped tech products.

"THE AMERICANS HAVE NEED OF THE TELEPHONE, BUT WE DO NOT"

When Alexander Graham Bell became one of a surprising number of people who believed they invented the first successful telephone in 1876, he immediately set out to try to sell what was obviously one of the most important inventions of all time.

Surprisingly, that didn't work out so well. Western Union's telegraph division considered the phones so flawed that an internal memo stated "the device is of inherently no value to us." In 1878, Sir William Henry Preece of the British Post Office dismissed the telephone as yet another hare-brained Colonial scheme, claiming that any supposed benefit of the telephone to the Americans was moot as "we have plenty of messenger boys."

As a result, Bell was foiled in his attempts to sell off what turned out to be one of the most lucrative patents in history, while the British messenger boy industry entered a slow decline from which it has never really recovered.

"I DON'T THINK THERE WILL BE A WOMAN PRIME MINISTER IN MY LIFETIME"

While we're on the subject of dubious predictions and decisions made by the British, we should touch on Margaret Thatcher and her ironic 1973 appearance on BBC interview show, "Val meets the VIPs" as Minister of Education.

When the topic turned to women in government and whether or not it would be inherently "good" to see a female PM, Thatcher pessimistically ruled out the idea of a woman running the UK while she was still alive, while also emphasizing that she thought the PM's gender wasn't as important as whether or not it was the right person for the job.

In that same interview, when asked if she was given the chance to be the Prime Minister would she take it, Thatcher laughed it off. She said that she didn't consider herself experienced enough for the job-"before you could even think of being Prime Minister, you'd need to have done a good deal more jobs than [Minister of Education and Science].

Six years and a good deal more jobs later, she rode a Tory tide of votes into 10 Downing Street.

"STOCKS HAVE REACHED WHAT LOOKS LIKE A PERMANENTLY HIGH PLATEAU"

Considered by some to be one of the first "celebrity economists," Irving Fisher was committed to the idea that the market was inherently rational, efficient, and self-correcting, which lead to his infamous declaration that the 1929 stock market had reached its "permanently high plateau" three days before the global economy abruptly fell off said plateau.

Fisher spent the next few months assuring everyone who was still listening that a natural turnaround was just around the corner before giving up on that idea to promote the somewhat more acceptable theories of vegetarianism, alcohol prohibition, and eugenics.

Fisher's theories of debt deflation and neoclassical economics came back in a big way in the 1980s as a sort of corollary to the older and more experimentally sound theory that there was a sucker born every minute.

"I HAVE NOT THE SMALLEST MOLECULE OF FAITH IN AERIAL NAVIGATION OTHER THAN BALLOONING"

If you believed everything you read on the Internet, you would expect quotes from turn-of-the-century British scientist Lord Kelvin to make up something like half of this list, and you'd also be confused as to why he was so respected when apparently every single prediction he ever made was wrong.

While Kelvin was in fact responsible for writing off heavier-than-air aviation less than a decade before the Wright Brothers' first flight, the belief that he proclaimed that "there is nothing new to be discovered in physics" in 1900 is almost certainly false.

In fact, some of his work at the time is now regarded as an early indicator of the belief that physics needed to move beyond the classical model, which Kelvin regarded as insufficient for explaining heat and light.

On the other hand, he also believed the Earth had only 400 years of breathable oxygen remaining, so...nobody's perfect.

"OCTOBER 21, 2011 WILL BE THE FINAL DAY OF THIS EARTH'S EXISTENCE"

Predicting (and profiting from) the Rapture based on Biblical analysis, numerology, or just getting a wild hair has been a Christian tradition for almost as long as the religion itself has existed.

Harold Camping and his Family Radio church/ministry/business are only the most recent and most visible of a long line of hucksters. Like many people in the Rapture business, Camping managed to survive what many would think would be a major failure with no significant loss of followers or revenue.

His initial date of September 6 1994 for the Apocalypse came and went, and years later he and Family Radio were able to comfortably ignore his early public failure.

His May 21, 2011 deadline, however, was much firmer and delivered to a larger audience, such that crowds of people were surrounding his headquarters as the date came and went.

Camping cooked up a handy explanation: the Judgment Day of May 21 was more of the spiritual sort of judgment rather than the more cinematic apocalyptic firestorm judgment, and the real big show would start up on October 21 of that same year.

Incredibly, many of his listeners stayed in the flock, forsaking jobs, families, and fulfilling lives, and as the new deadline passed with no word from Family Radio reporters were there to capture their heartbreak.

That finally seemed to do the trick, as Camping retired from his speaking performances and today claims that seeking to determine the exact date of the Rapture is "sinful."