I don’t have any quotations or cites, but I’m willing to bet that many people predicted great things for air travel when the Concorde was rolled out 50 years ago. Three hours from New York to Paris in 1960? We’ll have it down to thirty minutes by 2000, they must have said. Little did they know we’d be back up to 6.5 hours. Air travel has to be the only technology that has gone light years backward in the past 50 years. Oh, I know, flight engineers consider that we’ve gone light years *forward *in every conceivable way. I’ve heard it all before…but when all 6 feet+ of me is stuffed into a minuscule seat at 3 am over the Atlantic, it’s hard for me to appreciate the great strides they’ve made.
I mean, imagine you go to buy a computer tomorrow, and instead of neat little notebooks, laptops, iPads and sharp $150 monitors, the salesman shows you a hulking olive-green monstrosity in the backroom and says: She’s a beaut! Lemme turn on a couple more fans so the tubes don’t overheat, here. Only $2M, and it’s got something new: 2 KB of what we call Random Access Memory. Unbelievable stuff – you’re gonna love it!
I agree with Peter Morris that that list of quotations isn’t trustworthy. I have seen several of them in the book The Experts Speak, and know that many have been found to be spurious. Skeptical Inquirer, for instance, ran two articles debunking the quotation from the Patent Office that “everything has been invented” – no such claim was ever made by the office or its director. And I’ve recently seen this one questioned:
This isn’t to deny that people don’t make absurd claims or bad extrapolations – there are more than enough of them to go around. But when you see someone claim that the president of the foremost manufacturer of computers saying that there’s essentially no market for them, or the director of the patent office saying that there’s no more need for it, your BS-meter should be pegging. Not only are they in talking about their area of specialization, but the statements are against their own interest – especially their own economic interest. If they really did believe what they were supposed to have said, I think I’d expect them to lie and say the opposite.
Air travel today is far cheaper and more accessible than it was in 1960, though, even though the first jet airliner (the Boeing 707) was introduced the year before. Back then, most people didn’t fly. Domestically, they most likely drove a car. (Passenger train travel was in serious decline by 1960.) However, air travel (especially overseas) was still primarily for the wealthy.
What changed air travel was the establishment of airlines like Southwest (founded in 1971). I flew four members of my family from Boston to Baltimore last Christmas for less than $50 per person each way, for example.
I’ve seen a piece examining that quote too. According to what I read he wasn’t talking about computers overall, but was referring to one specific model. He wasn’t too far out, they actually sold 15 of them. The thing I read didn’t cite it’s source, or even identify which model. So you can take that as doubtful accuracy too. But it is somewhat more plausible that the legend.
Oh, I know, I know. And I don’t disgaree. My post was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I just wish we were hoppin’ onto the fifth-generation Concorde by now, and standing up, shoulder-to-shoulder, cause we didn’t want to pay $30 for a seat, since it was only going to take 20 minutes to get to Paris anyway.
A machine that can drive for any sort of distance at speed on a surface road needs shock absorbers. It needs bumpers. It needs crumple zones, and all the other assorted features that make a car crash-worthy. It needs to be rugged, in all the ways that airplanes normally aren’t, because we expect cars to take a level of abuse in day-to-day operation that would ground an ordinary airplane for safety inspection at the very least.
All this ruggedness adds weight. More weight means you need a more powerful engine. A more powerful engine means, all else being equal, that there’s a greater risk some idiot will do something stupid in his over-powered Flying Station Wagon. And of course, it adds to both the cost and mechanical complexity of the flying car.
It’s actually this last - qualification - that’s the biggie. James May went into it on one of his TV shows last night. There is in fact a flying car - not Moller - but to fly it in America you not only need a driving licence, but also a pilot’s license, a license to carry passengers in an aeroplane, and because the trailer with the disassembled fuselage and wings is so long, you need a haulage license too. Who’s going to bother with all that? And the car itself is a pokey little thing, not very comfortable at all.
Well, at that point, why not just drive your normal car to the airport, get in your Piper Cub, fly wherever you want, and rent a car when you get there?
There are plenty of light airplanes and helicopters that you can fly out of your local dinky airport, the only problem with them is that you won’t have a car waiting for you at your desitination unless you arrange one.
Well, so what? Is the nightmare of not having a waiting car so great that you’ll essentially pack a crappy car into your airplane? You could just carry around a moped in the back if it’s such a nightmare.
Back to the OP: here’s an “inevitable” prediction that didn’t quite work out :
In the 1950’s there were serious concerns about a terrible new social problem about to erupt in American society, that we were not prepared to handle: excess leisure time.
The logic was simple: the average person was working fewer and fewer hours due to modern technology. In factories, the old 6-day work week was replaced by an easier 5 days. In the home, the old ways of homekeeping were replaced by new, time-saving methods (refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, supermarkets)
Obviously, at this rate, the average factory worker would soon work only 4 days a week, and then only 3.And his wife would only have to cook once a week to feed the family.
So society was soon going to have to be radically re-organized to adapt to the new psychology, in which work was a minor part of life, and most of your time was devoted to leisure activities.
And “the Internet” (or more specifically for our purposes, “the Dope”).
Most people at the dawn of the Space Age saw space exploration as an inevitable climb to the next big project. Because of politics, budget crunches and the end of the Cold War, we now know that’s not so. No Moonbase, no manned mission to Mars, no orbital hotel etc. for the foreseeable future. We’re nowhere near the level of technological sophistication that Kubrick and Clarke foretold in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I’ve been trying to think of what genuinely “new” technology was developed in the 20th century - things not possible to imagine in the 19th century. I think electronics fits this; a scientist from 1900 would have a hard time wrapping his head around a video game on a laptop.
Our world-wide communication grid almost fits; wireless communication was known but I don’t know if they could imagine the extent to which it’s been taken.
Knowing nothing of DNA and the genome, genetic engineering would have been inconceivable, but I wouldn’t count it because it’s not a “technology” yet. In a hundred years we may have designed organisms doing all sorts of things. It’s just hard, not unimaginable.
AI is also hard but imaginable.
Things that would require unimaginable technology are interstellar travel, teleportation, mind reading, time travel, anti-gravity…
My Google-fu is failing me, but wasn’t it once thought that railroad travel would be impossible because the human body could not survive the blistering speeds (upwards of 40 mph)?
One could argue that the Internet fits the description in the OP. Certainly the idea of a global (or larger) communications network was known, but it was strictly a concept of science fiction.
Think The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or the Star Trek computer network. Both consisted of a ‘universal’ repository of known things, which could be accessed at will from anywhere in the galaxy. Sounds great for a sci-fi story…very futuristic.
I vaguely remember a Time magazine essay from the early 1980s that quoted that dire prediction, but haven’t been able to find it online. I did find this, however: Van Buren's Letter to President Jackson | Snopes.com
To be fair we should consider that it’s a matter of policy, not physical capability here. If Mollers dream came true tomorrow and we had $50k VTOL daily use vehicles, it would take getting used to, but would be no more cataclysmic than the introduction of the first automobiles. Some people would crash and die, same as today. Some would fall from the sky into day care centers and hospitals. When cars were first introduced there was no effective way to manage them either, we adapt, more effective methods develop. We trade a few thousand lives for expanding our reach in ways almost unimaginable. Living in rural desert areas and commuting 30 min to a major city 80 miles away.
