PS&L Blog

If you saw our cartoon you know it is laughable that any organization is still getting around to electricity. Even 60 years ago that premise would have been implausible. Here are some more laughable ideas and quotes from the past. Enjoy!

What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?

• The Quarterly Review, March, 1825.

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

•  Popular Mechanics, 1949

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,

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

Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?

• H. M. Warner, co-founder of Warner Bros., 1927.

We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.

• Decca Records, when they rejected The Beatles, 1962.

My point: Mobile web sites are a fait accompli, they are as inevitable as death and taxes but certainly a bit more fun. We can do all kinds of things with a well built mobile site. We can use a QR code to drive a smart phone user to a recruiting video. We can use a campus map to help a person find their appointment on campus. We can connect with our many audiences, all of whom will have a smart phone in way less than 10 years.

If you want to see More incorrect predictions click here.