OMG, Gwyneth Paltrow again! 
She seems to be the Queen of Hearts of all ridiculous woo. Her motto: “If it’s stupid, I have a product for it!”. I used to think she was a classy-looking lady, which I guess she is, but man, she is dumber than a rock.
Firstly, there’s a big difference between saying ‘they’ in general believed something, and saying ‘a small minority of nutcases’ believed something.
Secondly, I followed a couple of references back to the 19th century sources, and the sources didn’t say what it was claimed they said.
Thirdly, an academic shill for a large corporation, talking outside her area of expertise, doesn’t have much credibility. Genevieve Bell is not saying things in the media to entertain people. She’s trying to put across the message ‘our corporation’s fancy new technology is great, and anybody who doesn’t think it’s great is stupid’.
She’s probably deluding herself as much as her customers, but her business appears to be a proof of the “natural law” that fools and their money are soon parted. Any pain she might feel from criticism probably only lasts as far as the bank.
Before I bow out of this completely silly argument, just a few points for the record:
Yes, there is, but it’s often not “a small minority”. Somewhere on the order of about half of Americans don’t believe that climate change is caused by man-made GHG emissions (which includes the current president and most members of his party) or that it’s any kind of problem (it used to be more than half); similar numbers have crackpot ideas about evolution, and around one-third today don’t believe in human evolution at all. “A small minority of nutcases”, indeed.
“I spent five minutes on Google, and therefore I know more than experts who have studied this field for their entire careers.”
Either you didn’t read her bio, or you skimmed it with such extreme bias that you missed all the important points. What Bell was commenting on was precisely her area of expertise. She is an accomplished, distinguished scholar with a long track record in academia. That she works for Intel couldn’t be more irrelevant to the credibility of her comments on historical beliefs about novel technologies. She doesn’t work in their marketing department, FFS; Intel, like IBM and some other large forward-thinking corporations, are big enough and smart enough to fund basic pure research. Your ad hominem attack on Bell just reflects an ignorance of this fundamental fact. Her position at Intel is similar to that of an IBM Fellow, a distinguished scientist or engineer who is free to pursue his own research interests in the hope that it will provide long-term benefits in some possibly unexpected ways.
I spent a lot more than 5 min checking the original 19th century references, and they didn’t check out.
But feel free to believe whatever you like.