[meteorite-list] Book review of History of Meteoritics...

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:55:37 -0500
Message-ID: <28f701c8a5cf$d2291460$8250e146_at_ATARIENGINE>

Hi, Rob, List,

The opinion of the expert and the knowledgeable
is not always a good guide to the future. Here's a
small catalogue:

"I think there is a world market for about
five computers..."
Tom Watson, then IBM chairman, 1948:

"Telltale signs are everywhere -from the
unexpected persistence and thickness of
pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the
southward migration of a warmth-loving
creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.
Since the 1940s the mean global temperature
has dropped about 2.7? F."
- Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia
University in Time Magazine's June 24th, 1975
article "Another Ice Age?"

"The earth's crust does not move"
19th through early 20th century
accepted geological science, with
too many sources to quote

"That virus is a pussycat."
Dr. Peter Duesberg, molecular-biology professor
at U.C. Berkeley, on HIV, 1988

"What can be more palpably absurd than
the prospect held out of locomotives
traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?"
The Quarterly Review, March, 1825.

 "That the automobile has practically
reached the limit of its development is
suggested by the fact that during the past
year no improvements of a radical nature
have been introduced."
Scientific American, January 2, 1909.

"With over fifteen types of foreign cars
already on sale here, the Japanese auto
industry isn't likely to carve out a big share
of the market for itself."
Business Week, August 2, 1968.

"Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped
with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons,
computers in the future may have only 1,000
vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons."
Popular Mechanics, March 1949.

"Dear Mr. President: The canal system of this
country is being threatened by a new form of
transportation known as 'railroads' ... As you may
well know, Mr. President, 'railroad' carriages are
pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles per hour
by 'engines' which, in addition to endangering life
and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way
through the countryside, setting fire to crops, scaring
the livestock and frightening women and children.
The Almighty certainly never intended that people
should travel at such breakneck speed."
Martin Van Buren, Governor of New York,
who later went on to be President of the United States,
neither the first dimwit, nor the last, to hold that office.

"Rail travel at high speed is not possible, because
passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia."
Dr Dionysius Lardner (1793-1859), professor of
Natural Philosophy and Astronomy, University
College London.

The light bulb is "... good enough for our transatlantic
friends ... but unworthy of the attention of practical
or scientific men."
British Parliamentary Committee, referring to Edison's
light bulb, 1878.

"Such startling announcements as these should be
deprecated as being unworthy of science and
mischievious to its true progress."
Sir William Siemens, on Edison's light bulb, 1880.

"Everyone acquainted with the subject will recognize
it as a conspicuous failure."
Henry Morton, president of the Stevens Institute
of Technology, on Edison's light bulb, 1880.

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to
be seriously considered as a means of communication.
The device is inherently of no value to us."
A memo at Western Union, 1878.

"The Americans have need of the telephone,
but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys."
Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, British Post Office, 1878.

"It's a great invention but who would want to use it anyway?"
Rutherford B. Hayes, U.S. President, after a demonstration
of Alexander Bell's telephone, 1877.

"A man has been arrested in New York for attempting
to extort funds from ignorant and superstitious people
by exhibiting a device which he says will convey the
human voice any distance over metallic wires so that
it will be heard by the listener at the other end. He calls
this instrument a telephone. Well-informed people know
that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires."
News item in a New York newspaper, 1868.

"Transmission of documents via telephone wires is
possible in principle, but the apparatus required is
so expensive that it will never become a practical
proposition."
Dennis Gabor, British physicist and author of
Inventing the Future, 1962.

"The horse is here to stay but the
automobile is only a novelty-a fad."
The president of the Michigan Savings Bank
advising Henry Ford's lawyer not to invest in
the Ford Motor Co., 1903.

"The ordinary "horseless carriage" is at present
a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price
will probably fall in the future, it will never, of
course, come into as common use as the bicycle."
Literary Digest, 1899.

"Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical
and insignificant, if not utterly impossible."
Simon Newcomb (The Wright Brothers flew at
Kittyhawk 18 months later).

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist,
president of the British Royal Society, 1895.

"It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the
aeroplane, which two or three years ago were
thought to hold the solution to the (flying machine)
problem, have been exhausted, and that we must
turn elsewhere."
Thomas Edison, American inventor, 1895.

"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value."
Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy,
Ecole Superieure de Guerre, 1904.

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

"Radio has no future."
Lord Kelvin, Scottish mathematician and
physicist, former president of the Royal Society, 1897.

"Lee DeForest has said in many newspapers and
over his signature that it would be possible to transmit
the human voice across the Atlantic before many years.
Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading
statements, the misguided public has been persuaded
to purchase stock in his company."
A U.S. District Attorney, prosecuting American inventor
Lee DeForest for selling stock fraudulently through the
mail for his Radio Telephone Company in 1913.

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial
value. Who would pay for a message sent to no one in
particular?"
Associates of David Sarnoff responding to the latter's
call for investment in the radio in 1921.

"The cinema is little more than a fad. It's canned drama.
What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood
on the stage."
Charlie Chaplin, actor, producer, director, and studio
founder, 1916.

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
H. M. Warner, co-founder of Warner Brothers, 1927.

"That Professor Goddard with his 'chair' in Clark
College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian
Institution does not know the relation of action to
reaction, and of the need to have something better
than a vacuum against which to react-to say that
would be absurd. Of course, he only seems to lack
the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."
1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's
breakthrough work on rockets.

"A rocket will never be able to leave
the Earth's atmosphere."
New York Times, 1936.

"... too far-fetched to be considered."
Editor of Scientific American, in a letter to
Robert Goddard about Goddard's idea of a
rocket-accelerated airplane bomb. 1940.
(German V2 missiles came down on London
3 years later).

"We stand on the threshold of rocket mail."
U.S. postmaster general Arthur Summerfield,
in 1959.

"While theoretically and technically television
may be feasible, commercially and financially
it is an impossibility, a development of which
we need waste little time dreaming."
Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and
inventor of the vacuum tube, 1926.

"Television won't last because people will soon
get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."
Darryl Zanuck, movie producer, 20th Century Fox, 1946.

"Television won't last. It's a flash in the pan."
Mary Somerville, pioneer of radio educational
broadcasts, 1948.

"There is no likelihood man can ever tap the
power of the atom."
Robert Millikan, American physicist and
Nobel Prize winner, 1923.

"There is not the slightest indication that
nuclear energy will ever be obtainable.
It would mean that the atom would have
to be shattered at will."
Albert Einstein, 1932.

"The energy produced by the breaking down
of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone
who expects a source of power from the transformation
of these atoms is talking moonshine."
Ernest Rutherford, shortly after splitting the atom
for the first time.

"Atomic energy might be as good as our present-day
explosives, but it is unlikely to produce anything
very much more dangerous."
Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty,
then soon-to-be British Prime Minister, 1939.

"That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done
(research on). The bomb will never go off, and
I speak as an expert in explosives."
Admiral William Leahy, U.S. Admiral working
in the U.S. Atomic Bomb Project, advising
President Truman on atomic weaponry, 1944.

"The basic questions of design, material and
shielding, in combining a nuclear reactor with a
home boiler and cooling unit, no longer are problems...
 The system would heat and cool a home, provide
unlimited household hot water, and melt the snow from
sidewalks and driveways. All that could be done
for six years on a single charge of fissionable material
costing about $300."
Robert Ferry, executive of the U.S. Institute of
Boiler and Radiator Manufacturers, 1955.

"Nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners will
probably be a reality in 10 years."
Alex Lewyt, president of vacuum cleaner
company Lewyt Corp., in the New York Times in 1955.

"I have traveled the length and breadth of this
country and talked with the best people, and I
can assure you that data processing
is a fad that won't last out the year."
The editor in charge of business books
for Prentice Hall, 1957.

"(By 1985), machines (computers) will be
capable of doing any work Man can do."
Herbert A. Simon, of Carnegie Mellon University,
one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence
- speaking in 1965.

"But what... is it good for?"
IBM executive Robert Lloyd, speaking in 1968
about the microprocessor, the heart of today's computers.

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of
Digital Equipment Corportation (DEC), maker of
big business minicomputers,
arguing against the PC in 1977.

"To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and
project him into the controlling gravitational field
of the moon where the passengers can make
scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and
then return to earth - all that constitutes a wild
dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough
to say that such a man-made voyage will never
occur regardless of all future advances."
Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and
inventor of the vacuum tube, in 1926.

"Space travel is utter bilge."
Richard Van Der Riet Woolley, upon assuming
the post of Astronomer Royal (UK) in 1956.

"Space travel is bunk."
Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Astronomer Royal (UK),
1957 (two weeks later Sputnik orbited the Earth).

"There is practically no chance communications
space satellites will be used to provide better telephone,
telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States."
T. Craven, FCC Commissioner (USA), in 1961
(the first commercial communications satellite went
into service in 1965).

"What, sir, would you make a ship sail against
the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under
her deck? I pray you, excuse me, I have not the
time to listen to such nonsense."
Napoleon Bonaparte, when told of Robert Fulton's
steamboat, 1800s.

"The phonograph has no commercial value at all."
Thomas Edison, American inventor, 1880s.

"X-rays will prove to be a hoax."
Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1883.

"Fooling around with alternating current is just
a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever."
Thomas Edison, American inventor, 1889
(Edison often ridiculed the arguments of competitor
George Westinghouse for AC power).

"I must confess that my imagination refuses
to see any sort of submarine doing anything
but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea."
H.G. Wells, British novelist, in 1901.

"The idea that cavalry will be replaced by
these iron coaches is absurd. It is little short
of treasonous."
Comment of Aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Haig,
at tank demonstration, 1916.

"Very interesting Whittle, my boy,
but it will never work."
Cambridge Aeronautics Professor, when shown
Frank Whittle's plan for the jet engine.

"The world potential market for copying
machines is 5000 at most."
IBM, to the eventual founders of Xerox,
saying the photocopier had no market large
enough to justify production, 1959.

"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have
done the experiment. The literature was full
of examples that said 'you can't do this'."
Spencer Silver on the work that led to the
unique adhesives for 3M "Post-It" Notepads.

"I would sooner believe that two Yankee
professors lied, than that stones fell from the sky."
Thomas Jefferson, U.S. President, on hearing
reports of meteorites, 1790s(?).

"The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera.
It is absurd to go on seeking it...knife and pain
are two words in surgery that must forever be
associated in the consciousness of the patient."
Dr. Alfred Velpeau, French surgeon, 1839.

"Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction."
Pierre Pachet, British surgeon and
Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872.

"The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will
forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise
and humane surgeon"
Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon,
appointed Surgeon Extraordinary to
Queen Victoria, 1873.

"If excessive smoking actually plays a role
in the production of lung cancer, it seems
to be a minor one."
W.C. Heuper, National Cancer Institute, 1954.

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

"The more important fundamental laws and facts
of physical science have all been discovered,
and these are now so firmly established that
the possibility of their ever being supplanted
in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly
remote. Our future discoveries must be looked
for in the sixth place of decimals."
Albert. A. Michelson, German-born American physicist, 1894.

"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now;
all that remains is more and more precise measurement."
Lord Kelvin, speaking to the British Association for
the Advancement of Science, 1900.

"Four or five frigates will do the business
without any military force."
British prime minister Lord North, on dealing
with the rebellious American colonies, 1774.

"Ours has been the first (expedition) and doubtless
to be the last, to visit this profitless locality."
Lt. Joseph Ives, after visiting the Grand Canyon in 1861.

"They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist-"
Last words of Gen. John Sedgwick, spoken as
he looked out over the parapet at enemy lines
during the Battle of Spotsylvania in 1864.

"No, it will make war impossible."
Hudson Maxim, inventor of the machine gun,
in response to the question "Will this gun not
make war more terrible?" from Havelock Ellis,
an English scientist, 1893.

"Man will not fly for 50 years."
Wilbur Wright, aviation pioneer, to brother
Orville, after a disappointing flying experiment,
1901 (their first successful flight was in 1903).

"The invention of aircraft will make war
impossible in the future."
George Gissing, 1903.

"The coming of the wireless era will make
war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous."
Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the radio,
Technical World Magazine, October, 1912, page 145.

"The Americans are good about making fancy
cars and refrigerators, but that doesn't mean they are
any good at making aircraft. They are bluffing.
They are excellent at bluffing."
Hermann Goering, Commander-in-Chief of
the Luftwaffe, 1942.

"It will be gone by June."
Variety, passing judgement on
rock 'n roll in 1955.

"Remote shopping, while entirely feasible,
will flop-because women like to get out of
the house, like to handle merchandise, like to
be able to change their minds."
Time, 1966, in one sentence writing off
e-commerce long before anyone had ever heard of it.

"It doesn't matter what he does,
he will never amount to anything."
Albert Einstein's teacher to his father, 1895

"...so many centuries after the Creation it is
unlikely that anyone could find hitherto unknown
lands of any value."
Committee advising King Ferdinand and
Queen Isabella of Spain regarding a proposal
by Christopher Columbus, 1486.

"Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground
to try and find oil? You're crazy."
Associates of Edwin L. Drake refusing his
suggestion to drill for oil in 1859.

"No one will pay good money to get from
Berlin to Potsdam in one hour when he can
ride his horse there in one day for free."
King William I of Prussia, on hearing of
the invention of trains, 1864.

"The concept is interesting and well-formed,
but in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea
must be feasible."
A Yale University management professor in
response to a college assignment by Fred Smith,
proposing a reliable overnight delivery service,
in 1966. Smith would later go on to found
Federal Express Corp.



Sterling K. Webb
----------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rob McCafferty" <rob_mccafferty at yahoo.com>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>; <mmorgan at mhmeteorites.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 8:21 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Book review of History of Meteoritics...



Nice review.From it I am left with a sense of disbelief that many prominet
scientists seemed to refuse to believe that rocks fell from the sky.
I assume in the book there is a reference to Anaxogoras in ancient Greece
who was the first to suggest thatvery thing...although Diogenes is the one
with a meteorite class named after him, ironically)

Rob McC


--- On Wed, 4/23/08, mmorgan at mhmeteorites.com <mmorgan at mhmeteorites.com>
wrote:

> From: mmorgan at mhmeteorites.com <mmorgan at mhmeteorites.com>
> Subject: [meteorite-list] Book review of History of Meteoritics...
> To: meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
> Date: Wednesday, April 23, 2008, 9:33 PM
> Some of you may be interested in a really good meteorite
> book called the "History of Meteoritics and Key
> Collections". I did a review of the book for the
> Society for Sedimentary Geology. The review can be found
> here:
> http://paleo.ku.edu/palaios/reviews2008.html.
>
> Matt Morgan
> ----------------------
> Matt Morgan
> Mile High Meteorites
> http://www.mhmeteorites.com
> P.O. Box 151293
> Lakewood, CO 80215 USA
>
> ______________________________________________
> http://www.meteoritecentral.com
> Meteorite-list mailing list
> Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list


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Received on Thu 24 Apr 2008 01:55:37 AM PDT