Man on earth can no more get rid of these demonic "heavens" than man can by airplane or rockets or other means get up above the air envelope which is about our earthly globe and in which man breathes.
Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, The Truth Shall Make You Free (1943), p. 285
A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth's atmosphere.
The New York Times, January 13, 1920. The Times offered a retraction on July 17, 1969, as Apollo 11 was on its way to the moon.
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 De Forest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, in 1957 De Forest Says Space Travel Is Impossible, Lewiston Morning Tribune via Associated Press, February 25, 1957
Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it.
C. P. Scott, BBC History of television
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.
Where a calculator like the ENIAC today is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh only 1½ tons.
Andrew Hamilton, "Brains that Click", Popular Mechanics 91 (3), March 1949, (pp. 162 et seq.) at p. 258. Notwithstanding that events have proceeded greatly since the prediction was fulfilled, this was a correct prediction in the short-term.
There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.
Steve Ballmer, USA Today, April 30, 2007.
There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.
Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), in a talk given to a 1977 World Future Society meeting in Boston. This is widely quoted but Olsen claims it is taken out of context, that he was not referring to personal computers but to a household computer that would control the home.
Reference: "Ken Olsen", Snopes, includes bibliography.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions
