And You Thought It Would Fail / Real Life

Aeronautics

• Lord Kelvin believed that heavier-than-air flight was impossible and X-rays were probably a hoax. (He changed his mind about the second one after he saw the evidence.) Also, Kelvin insisted that radio had no future in 1897 (he preferred to send messages by a pony) and that it would take human beings two hundred years to land on the moon. Horrible Histories put it best in a section summarising this kind of phenomenon, noting in the section about the predicted short lifespan of talking pictures that "Lord Kelvin was dead by then, so he was not able to tell us that talking films were impossible anyway."
  
  Kelvin's refusal to accept new ideas is shown in the 2004 movie adaptation of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, where he outright claims that science has reached its peak in his time, and any discoveries are hoaxes. This is one of Lord Kelvin's actual claims, at least with regards to physics.
• When Robert Goddard pitched the idea that rockets could be used to fly through space, the editor of The New York Times (note: not a rocket scientist) thought the whole concept was patently ridiculous. After all, there's no air in space, so what's the rocket engine supposed to push against? The New York Times later published a correction... in July of 1969.
• While developing the first turbojet, Frank Whittle was told by the professor of Aeronautical Engineering at Cambridge:
  "Very interesting, Whittle my boy, but it will never work." ^note He did have a somewhat reasonable cause… no known metal/alloy could withstand the temperature/pressure produced and keep the engine light enough at the time to be useable
• In 1938, aeronautics pioneer Theodor von Karman recommended against investment into turbojet technology when he was serving on an advisory board for the US Navy. To be fair, he merely thought the technology was not ready for practical use just yet, not "impossible." Within a year, a prototype jet airplane was flying in Germany. It took until 1944 before the Germans could put a jet fighter into mass production and it was so plagued by issues that more of it were lost to mechanical failure than enemy action.^note  The Brits also managed to put a jet fighter into service before the end of the war, but it only flew combat missions at a point when dominance of the air was already a question settled in the Allies' favor So narrowly on the question "In the likely upcoming war against Germany and/or Japan, would this technology be of much use?" his answer of "no" was entirely correct. But then the people who decide on research budgets don't appreciate such kinds of nuance.
• "Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible" – Simon Newcomb, 1902.
• "Aero planes are interesting toys but of no military value" – French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, who would later have an aircraft carrier named after him.
  • This was debunked incredibly fast: later that year, the Italians started using airplanes for a scouting military mission (October 22) and, in what at the time had been pre-emptively declared as a war crime (but only from balloons), bombing (on November 1, an Italian pilot on a scouting mission embarked four bombs and dropped them on the enemy).
• Averted by Wilbur Wright, who remarked in 1906, "I do not believe it [the airplane] will supplant surface transportation. I believe it will always be limited to special purposes. It will be a factor in war. It may have a future as a carrier of mail." While it seems dismissive of his invention, he was, in a sense, correct — while airplanes are very useful, due to the high cost of air travel they have not supplanted surface transportation outside of a few relatively narrow (if important) areas like long-distance passenger transportation (in which case they actually have supplanted surface transportation, most notably ocean liners; while it seemed they might do the same to trains, the advent of High Speed Rail has challenged that claim...) and mail/package delivery where it is cost-competitive. Shorter-distance transportation and long-distance heavy freight remain largely the province of surface vehicles (in particular, air travel never supplanted ships or rail for freight transportation over long distances, especially with the rise of the intermodal container).
  • On the other hand, the Wright Brothers' father, a preacher, once declared in a sermon that man would never fly, even using the old saying, "If man were meant to fly, God would have given him wings."
• After the first flight of their new Boeing 247 in 1933, one engineer of Boeing said that there would never be a bigger plane built. The Boeing 247 is a twin-engined prop plane with room for only ten passengers. For added irony, even at the time there were already bigger planes, like the Soviet TB-3 heavy bomber.
• When the newly-formed European consortium Airbus released a mid-range widebody airliner, the A300, the CEO of Boeing when asked about it, didn't even know what it was and then when it was described to him, snorted that "sounds like a typical government airliner. They'll build a couple dozen then go out of business." A few years later, Eastern Airlines placed an order for 23 of them. Then Pan Am. Then Japan Air. Then Indonesia. All traditional customers of Boeing at Seattle. By the time Boeing rushed the 757 into production in 1981 to try and compete, Airbus had orders for 300 planes and an option for 200 more. Fast forward to today, and Airbus is at any given time either the biggest or second biggest aircraft manufacturer in the world and Boeing's bitterest commercial rival—and, for what it's worth, not in any substantial way owned by any government (about 25-30% is owned by European government-owned investment companies, but the vast majority of voting shares are held by private investors, and the government investment companies are not entirely under the thumb of their respective political leaderships). However both companies have rather good connections into the political sphere and get big government contracts regularly, to say the least.
  • The biggest irony? A300 sales were faltering due to wide-body twin-engine planes not being popular in an era where only planes with more than two engines were allowed to fly long-distance, and there was just not enough demand for short high-capacity flights... until Boeing lobbied the FAA to introduce ETOPS for their future twin-engine planes, something that Airbus immediately took advantage of. Whoops.
• When General Ernst Udet, one of the bigwigs of the new German Luftwaffe, saw the prototype BF 109 produced by Willy Messerschmitt, he contemptuously said, "that thing will never make a fighter." Not only did Udet change his opinion within months, but the BF 109 was also the only fighter Germany had in mass-production until halfway through World War II.
• General Billy Mitchell both faced this trope and engaged in it himself in the early 20th century.
  • On one hand, he was highly prophetic with regards to the military value of airplanes, proclaiming that they would ultimately make the surface fleets of the time, particularly the grand dreadnought battleships that formed the core of any navy worth its salt, obsolete. He felt that America's air power should be organized into a separate Air Force, and faced bitter resistance from the military establishment, who believed that he was overstating the value of military aviation and that airplanes should be under the control of the Army and Navy.
  • On the other hand, he ridiculed spending money on aircraft carriers in the '20s and thought that the money should instead go to building land-based bombers. During World War II, the aircraft that best matched Mitchell's specifications, the B-17 Flying Fortress, was excellent at combating land-based targets but had a notoriously poor record when attacking ships (except for submarines). Carrier aviation was almost singlehandedly responsible for America's victory over the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific, and contrary to Mitchell's predictions, they kept surface fleets very relevant indeed through the 20th century and into the 21st. Mitchell was correct in predicting that battleships would be rendered obsolete... but completely whiffed on the idea that a new type of ship would replace them.
  • Funnily enough, the bomber named after him – the B-25 Mitchell – was a medium, land-based bomber that disproved his theory: it proved to be a very capable anti-shipping/submarine aircraft, though it was ineffective against the capital ships Mitchell predicted such aircraft would be successful against.
• Nearly no one in the early-mid '50s thought artificial satellites would be a big deal. While both the Soviet Union and the United States were focusing on making satellites for recon purposes, they thought that the technology wouldn't generate any interest outside of military applications. Even then, most military commanders thought that the funds used to develop orbital rockets would be better used to make more efficient ICBMs. The Vostok program in particular, whose goal was to put a man into orbit, was viewed as a pet project that no one would care about even if it was somehow successful. Indeed, Sputnik 1 was launched when it was simply to quiet concerns about the viability of machines to function in space, and throughout the world, its success was announced rather casually. As it turned out, October 4, 1957 ended up becoming one the biggest wham episodes in human history, and saw the entire world reacting with an immediate shock and awe that no other single scientific achievement had ever been able to produce, not even the atomic bomb or the ICBM. Even after this, both the USSR and the USA thought that military endeavors were the future of space out of the logical belief that "lightning couldn't strike twice", but after Yuri Gagarin and Vostok 1 generated just as much hype, suddenly both sides found themselves in a mad scramble to develop space that quickly overshadowed not only Recon satellites or ICBM production, but almost every other aspect of the Cold War. Today, most satellites are commercial or scientific in nature, and the military use of space never really moved past recon satellites (albeit partly due to treaties against the militarization of space)^note Like the appropriately named Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits the militarization of outer space (defined as being 100 km above the earth).
• During much of the development of the Boeing 747 - easily one of the most iconic jet airplanes and one of two or three a layperson can name and recognize - it was seen as a "demotion" within Boeing to be assigned there instead of the "cool" 2707 supersonic plane. Ironically it was in no small part precisely because it was seen as such an afterthought that many of the things that made the 747 so incredibly successful and iconic happened. It was determined early on that it had to be usable for freight as soon everybody would be flying supersonic and thus the only possible use for subsonic planes would be cargo. So the nose door was developed which still allows the 747 to load bigger pieces of cargo than almost any other airliner.^note Aside from special designs like the modified Airbus Beluga or the Antonov An-225 Mriya (of which only one was ever built, and that one was destroyed in 2022 during the Russia-Ukraine war) The nose door necessitated a higher cockpit and for aerodynamic reasons there couldn't just be a straight wall behind the cockpit, so the iconic "hump" came about almost by accident. The jumbo's four engines also gave it good range over water in the days before ETOPS. The fact that Boeing management didn't much care for the project meant key customers like PanAm had unprecedented input on the design of the plane, getting a plane that was very much exactly what they wanted. Boeing was also successful in convincing European buyers (no European planemaker would even attempt something on the 747 scale until the A380) and Lufthansa has ordered a passenger version of every significant variant, including the 747-100, the 747-200, the 747-400 and finally the 747-8I (for which they were launch customer and almost the only one to care about the passenger, not the freight, variant) - brand and product loyalty over half a century.

Architecture

• In general, a lot of buildings modern critics, tourists, and journalists hail as beautiful and impressive were panned at the time of their construction.
• Gustave Eiffel designed his famous tower for the 1888 Barcelona World Fair but was turned down by the people in charge on the basis that it was ugly and expensive and didn't fit with the rest of the city. He submitted then the idea to those responsible for the '89 Paris World Fair and was accepted... with the condition that it would be dismantled after the fair was over. During the construction, the project was heavily criticized by the French press, and the famous writers Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas, fils, together with composer Charles Gounod, wrote a public protest letter where they described the tower as "useless and monstrous", "shame of Paris" and "an unfunny skeleton". Novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans said that it was "a suppository full of holes". To top it, the fair was a public failure... but it turns out that a giant iron tower in the middle of Paris makes an excellent broadcast antenna, so it was never destroyed. This is why it gives you a free Broadcast Tower in every city when you build it in Civilization IV.
  • One protest letter sent to Charles Alphand, the Minister of Works and Commissioner for the Exposition, wasn't very subtle:
  Excerpt: We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate devotees of the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against the erection… of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower… To bring our arguments home, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream. And for twenty years… we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal.
  • Eiffel made a pretty penny, too: The fair's organizers let him have the revenue from visitors riding the elevators, figuring no one would want to climb the ugly thing.
  • Guy de Maupassant was known to eat in the restaurant in the Eiffel Tower daily, and when asked why he replied that it was the only place in Paris where he could eat without having to look at the edifice. ^note No, we don't know why he didn't just go inside a building or turn around. It was also a pretty decent restaurant, but that goes without saying for anywhere de Maupassant would eat.
• When Chicago hosted the next World Fair in 1893, Eiffel's tower was already an iconic masterpiece. To "out-Eiffel Eiffel" became the rallying cry of the fair's designers, feeling that unless they put up something equally iconic and new, Chicago's fair would never get out from under Paris' shadow. Architects and engineers proposed a multitude of towers, but the designers felt (rightly) that there was no way to make a more beautiful tower, and they shouldn't compete directly with Eiffel. The proposals became steadily more ridiculous (a giant log cabin, a zip line running to New York City). One young engineer had an idea, but everyone who looked at it called it flimsy, impossible to build, and so terrifying that no one would get on it. But he came back with detailed proofs that it would work, and time was running out, and nobody had come up with anything better... and so George Ferris got to build his big wheel.
• The expensive and extensive Haussmann renovations of Paris were panned by all sorts of critics for a long time during and after the fact. Of course, some of what was being criticized was exactly what the renovations set out to do, such as making the city easier to control... France had had too many regime changes in recent memory, and Napoleon III was doing his darnedest not to butterfinger it yet again (N.B.: he did anyway, but in the urban planning dimension of the problem, it turns out he had the right idea). Today, its results define much of what tourists admire Paris for, such as the boulevards and parks.
  • To elaborate, the wide beautiful boulevards were designed to be hard to barricade and easy to move artillery on. It didn't work out; although they were in fact pretty easy to move artillery on (a bit too easy, as Germany demonstrated about a century after the renovations started), it turns out that irate Parisians can barricade anything.
• Another famous example is the Berlin Cathedral opened in 1905, which was absolutely loathed during its lifetime.
• The original World Trade Center was seen as a blight on the Lower Manhattan skyline when it was constructed from 1968-73. Lewis Mumford referred to it as a pair of "glass-and-metal filing cabinets" built by people obsessed with "purposeless giantism and technological exhibitionism", and argued that its massive footprint had badly disrupted the cityscape, traffic flow, waterfront and weather patterns^note nobody seems to have realized that two massive structures that close together would create a hell of a tornado alley of Lower Manhattan, an opinion shared by Jane Jacobs. This was to say nothing of the controversy over how its construction saw the demolition of most of the old Radio Row (more here) neighborhood to make room for it, or how it produced a glut of office space in a city that, in the '70s, was already facing serious problems filling the offices it already had. In the '70s, it was seen as a symbol of everything wrong with The Big Rotten Apple. Over time, however, its towering edifice grew on many New Yorkers, to the point where, after the complex's destruction on 9/11, one of the most popular proposals to replace it was simply to rebuild the Twin Towers as they were before, to the point where history arguably repeated itself to an extent when people complained about the Freedom Tower that was built instead. ^note There was also a movement to not build anything, led by area residents (including Patti Smith) who loved the increased sunlight and sense of open space.
• Guess what people thought about the Golden Gate Bridge during its planning and construction? Well, suffice it to say, there were about five thousand lawsuits against its construction.
• King Ludwig II of Bavaria was declared insane and deposed because he spent much of the kingdom's treasury on his extravagant "fairy tale" castles, particularly Neuschwanstein. Within weeks of his death, tourists began visiting his castles, which remain cultural icons of Germany to this day. Neuschwanstein even provided the inspiration for the Cinderella Castle, which is the centerpiece of the Disney Theme Parks.

Computers

• Thomas Watson, International Business Machines Corporation, 1943: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
• In general, its been historically easy to make this mistake given the limitations of early computers and the lack of other technologies to make certain items desirable. The computers of today represent millions of different innovations in hardware, software, content, and configuration.
  • Another thing that tends to get this treatment are optional features in hardware. These features are to make the product stand out from the competition. An example was ATI, and later AMD, for years supported hardware accelerated tessellation, a feature that generates polygons on low-poly models to make them more detailed without needing to spend more memory on a high-poly model. It wasn't used at all until Microsoft standardized the feature, then it suddenly became the must-have thing on GPUs from there on.
• Linux got this from its creator:
  Linus Torvalds: I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones.[...] It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc.), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks.
  • Today, Linux has been ported to more platforms than any other kernel, and Linux-based operating system dominates nearly every area besides embedded devices and desktop computers.
• As mentioned in this Cracked article, Xerox is infamous for this in the computer industry. While they pioneered the personal computer long before Apple and IBM, their sales strategy was flawed and ultimately backfired. As a result, several of the technologies developed at their research facility PARC – the graphical user interface, the mouse, networking, e-mail, laser printing, object-oriented programming and other equally important pillars for today's computer industry – were dismissed and abandoned so other companies could build billion-dollar empires around those technologies. Why? Because the East Coast-based management of Xerox Corporation wasn't interested in anything that had no direct application to photocopying. You may bang your head against the wall now (they sure did).
• Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, in 1977: "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."^note He was not talking about personal computers, but home automation – that is, a computer controlling the home. There are plans to make him wrong about that too, though they aren't doing very well. Later, however, he said, "the personal computer will fall flat on its face in business," which ended up being completely wrong.
• Media critic Neil Postman, writing from the mid-eighties to the early nineties, believed that there was a fundamental shift afoot in the dominant medium of the day from print to television. When a little thing called the internet came along, he dismissed it as a passing craze.
• "Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney." – Clifford Stoll in "Newsweek", 1995.^note He has taken it in good stride though, and has taken it as a lesson not to be so quick to dismiss something.
• "I went to see Professor Douglas Hartree, who had built the first differential analyzers in England and had more experience in using these very specialized computers than anyone else. He told me that, in his opinion, all the calculations that would ever be needed in this country could be done on the three digital computers which were then being built — one in Cambridge, one in Teddington, and one in Manchester. No one else, he said, would ever need machines of their own, or would be able to afford to buy them." That conversation happened circa 1951 and was published in 1970.
• Browsing the Web, according to Swedish communication minister Ines Uusmann during The '90s, who claimed that people would not have time to browse aimlessly. During her mandate, Sweden became world-leading in internet usage.
• Bill Gates himself said in 1993, "The Internet? We are not interested in it." He would change his opinion slightly in his book The Road Ahead two years later, when he wrote, "Today's Internet is not the information highway I imagine, but you can think of it as the beginning of a highway."
• Intel, the creator of the microprocessor, initially saw the only market for them controlling traffic lights. Even well into The '80s, with the success of the IBM Personal Computer, powered by its chips, Intel still thought it was a fad. To be fair, Intel primarily made memory chips back then.
  • When Apple was drawing up the initial plans for the iPhone, they first went to Intel to ask if they wanted to develop the processor for it. Intel passed, so Apple went with ARM instead, setting a massive trend for the mobile market in the process and contributing to ARM overtaking Intel's x86 as the most used CPU instruction set in the world.
• The New York Times had Erik Sandberg-Diment, dismiss "windowing" (opening more than one program at a time) in 1984 and laptops in 1985. Sandberg-Diment went on to found one of the earliest magazines dedicated to personal computers later on, when technology caught up with laptops and "windowing".
• In 1976, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell was approached by one of his employees who asked him for $50,000 in exchange for one-third of the company he was starting. Bushnell turned him down. That employee was Steve Jobs and said company was Apple Computer, which would eventually become the biggest technology company in the world.
• 3dfx, a manufacturer of 3D graphics accelerators, scoffed at the idea of rival company NVIDIA moving the part that positions polygons in 3D space (known as transforming) into the GPU, saying that a fast enough CPU could do the job. They soon went defunct a couple of years later for not making a GPU that could do such and most of its assets were bought out by said rival company.
• In late 2018, NVIDIA launched the RTX 20 series of video cards that had two major features: real-time ray tracing and AI-enhanced upscaling (called DLSS). But people wrote both features off due to a lack of supported games, confusion about the "RTX" branding with people thinking that ray-tracing was an NVIDIA only thing (DLSS is, but not ray tracing), the huge performance cut when ray tracing was enabled, and issues with DLSS in that the AI had to be "trained" per game and the results were often times lackluster. With improvements to the initial implementations and a better understanding of how to best use ray tracing, plus AMD adding hardware support in their RDNA2 GPUs, ray tracing has cemented itself as a feature that'll stay. DLSS also got an improvement to the point where it didn't need game specific training and the image quality could now be imperceptible to what it was upscaling to, allowing it to stay as a staple feature. Although DLSS is still NVIDIA only, it pushed AMD to make a similar feature that's compatible on any GPU.
• Microsoft Windows got this on its first launch from the tech press, until its breakthrough with Windows 3.0 in 1990. Windows NT also got this from the tech press and professionals working with OS/2 and UNIX, due to NT's lateness and high memory and processor requirements, both of which OS/2 and Unix were no stranger to themselves as operating systems for servers and workstations. NT would prove successful as an enterprise OS before being merged with the consumer Windows line with XP.
• Les autoroutes de l’information, aka the Théry report — produced in 1994 by Gérard Théry, Alain Bonnafé, and Michel Guieysse for the French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur — concluded that the Internet is poorly suited for the provision of commercial services, and as such could not displace the Minitel service. Théry might have been a little biased there, as he was one of Minitel's creators. ^note Now, one of the report's main objections was valid: there was no protection against eavesdropping and tampering of data transmission, a.k.a. a man-in-the-middle attack. That is, until Netscape introduced HTTPS, that same year.
• Similar to how video game industry analysts at the start of the 2010s, phone and web games would displace console and portable game systems to the point of killing them off, computer industry analysts thought that after the rise of the smartphone and eventually tablets such as the iPad, that traditional desktop and laptop computers would be killed off. It got to the point that Apple started claiming their mobile devices would bring in the "Post PC Era." However, traditional computers didn't die off. If anything during the 2010s, the average person replaced their computer for something better less frequently. With COVID-19 lockdowns, the laptop and desktop computer industry received a boon as people realized that mobile devices weren't really as convenient anymore and people needed upgrades to host their virtual meetings, play games, or do other activities.

Other Electronics

• Once Sony unveiled the Walkman, many thought it would be a failure for being a tape deck that didn't record or have loudspeakers. Others thought that consumers wouldn't want to use headphones in public. Akio Morita made a bet that he would resign if the product failed. Not only did it sell well, but portable music players have also become a mainstay.
• Apple has been on the receiving end of this a lot:
  • A review of the iPod at launch: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." The Creative NOMAD was discontinued in 2004. Granted, by the time iDevices really took over the world they'd picked up wireless and way, way more space than a NOMAD, but even in the mid-'00s the iPod, with help from Apple iTunes, was quickly becoming the standard for MP3 players.
  • The iPhone (and by extension, all modern smartphones) also got its share of this at launch. Naysayers argued that its touchscreen was imprecise compared to physical keypads (especially when it came to typing), the battery life wasn't long enough, and that a cellphone with uncompromised access to the Internet would overwhelm mobile networks (which admittedly it did for a while). Most of these problems were either ironed out as time went on or were non-issues to begin with for most people and now the smartphone paradigm codified by the iPhone is the overwhelming norm in the cellphone industry with very few exceptions.
    • Famously Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft at the time, publicly laughed at the iPhone - saying that it "doesn't appeal to business customers" due to the lack of a physical keyboard, while the $500 price point made it unattractive to everyday consumers, and said that their more traditional Windows Mobile ecosystem and Zune music players offered greater value. Despite that, just a few years later, Microsoft was forced to compete with the iPhone directly by dumping Windows Mobile and bringing out a new touch-focused "Windows Phone" OS while buying Apple competitor Nokia,^note To be precise: Microsoft bought Nokia's handset division, not the whole company. Nokia Oyj remains a major network equipment manufacturer, while licensing their brand to smartphone maker HMD Global. but by that point it was too late and the products struggled to gain marketshare from either the iPhone or the increasingly popular Android ecosystem.
    • A more microcostic example of this was iOS's lack of support for Adobe Flash due to an Executive Veto from Apple. Critics argued that this undercut Apple's claim that the iPhone and iPad supported the "full Internet", and that Android would win the Smartphone War hands down simply due to its willingness to support Flash. In response, Steve Jobs published an open letter outlining the problems with Flash, especially when it came to mobile devices; namely that it was too inflexible (due to being entirely proprietary and controlled by Adobe, unlike most other web standards) and power hungry. Sure enough, Adobe ran into the same problems that Jobs had mentioned when they tried to implement Flash on Android, and eventually gave up on Flash on mobile completely after just a few years, vindicating Apple and Jobs in the process. The rise of smartphones in The New '10s was a major contributor towards Flash's eventual retirement at the end of 2020, alongside its numerous performance and security issues.
    • When the iPhone and Android phones first emerged, people wondered what they were going to do with all of those apps when they mainly used their phones for calls and texts. Nowadays, it's more common for people to joke about using their phones for everything but making phone calls.
  • Likewise, a lot of people mocked the iPad for being "just a bigger iPod". It didn't help that Microsoft had attempted to kickstart the tablet computer trend in the early '00s, and fell flat on their face. The iPad was so successful that it single-handedly launched the tablet computer market.^note Now why did one succeed where the other had failed? As Windows was their bread and butter, Microsoft simply tried to cram a whole x86 PC into the tablet format. The result: bulky, heavy, hot machines with a completely inadequate interface. Apple did not make a "tablet Mac", instead using more economic ARM processors, and a lightweight operating system designed from scratch for touchscreens.
    • A great experiment is to read this Gizmodo article from 2010. It correctly predicted that the naysayers would be wrong... and the comments section is filled with people mocking the writer and claiming that he didn't know what he was talking about and that the iPad was the second coming of Pogs, if anything. More recent comments, in turn, have a field day by pointing out who really didn't know what they were talking about.
  • Although smartwatches in general have gotten this rap, this was especially the case with Apple's take on it. But it's almost harder to find someone who doesn't have both an iPhone and an Apple Watch.
  • People poked fun at the Air Pods, a set "truly wireless" earbuds. Much of it was simply the idea of having something in your ear all the time much like the Bluetooth earpieces of the mid-2000s which looked so ridiculous that it was common for Tim & Eric characters to sport them. Similarly with the Apple Watch, it's almost harder to find someone who doesn't have Air Pods along with their iPhone these days.
• Thomas Edison:
  • He once said the phonograph was "a mere toy, it has no commercial value." But he also admitted it was one of his personal favorite inventions. Interestingly enough, he would then go on to say that there was no way that radio would ever replace phonographs. His insistence on continuing to focus on phonograph production (which were expensive) over radios (which were relatively cheap) was what ended up causing Edison Records to ultimately go under.
  • Edison was, later in life, phenominally uninterested in running the part of his company that produced electric lights and motors, thinking such things wouldn't be as valuable as phonographs. So he sold his shares to an employee. The company's name? General Electric.
• During the HD-DVD vs Blu Ray war, the writers at Cracked said "HD-DVD format will win this format war handily. congratulations HD-DVD!"— but it was a comedic article, basing its choice on what format had the least stupid name.
• "TV will never be a serious competitor for radio because people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn't time for it." from the New York Times, 1939. Perfectly logical, but completely wrong.
  • The television was deemed an "idiot's" machine when it was released by most people, and that it was a crap idea. People mocked it with one of the most quoted phrases being: "The television is a radio with pictures. Why even bother? In another 5 years, no one will even remember the television." Guess what became the most popular electronic just 20 years later?
• The telephone was mocked by most people when the idea was presented back in the day. Theodore Roosevelt Sr. (yes, the father of the president) is noted as having thought Alexander Graham Bell's telephone was an interesting toy but had no future.
  • Texting. There was a time when people thought, "Why would I want to spend more time typing a message to a friend when I can just talk directly?" These days, it'd be more like, "Why would I want to spend more time talking to a friend, possibly interrupting them at an inopportune moment, when I can just send a text?"
    • Exemplified by this Mad TV sketch.
• E-readers. Most people thought that paper books would still be the preferred method of reading when the Sony E-reader, Amazon Kindle, and later the Barnes and Noble Nook were released, respectively; and Borders was so insistent the technology had no market that they refused to release one as these units began to sell, up until it was too late for them catch up. To date, millions of E-readers and E-books have been sold from Sony, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble, and Borders filed for bankruptcy in late 2011^note There were many other missteps they took that contributed to the bankruptcy, such as opening too many stores at once and having the same attitude towards online shopping, but the e-reader miscalculation is the most frequently cited one.
• David Sarnoff wanted people to invest in radio in the 1920′s. Their response?
  “No imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?“
• US President William McKinley died when he was shot at the Pan-American Exposition. Surgeons refused to use the newfangled x-ray machine exhibited there to find the bullet (they didn't know the long term effects), and had to operate with only reflected sunlight for visibility due to the inability to use candles (as their anesthetic was flammable), despite electric lights being everywhere at the fair.
• An unidentified Boston newspaper said in 1865 "it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires as may be done with dots and dashes of Morse code, and that, were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value."
• Videophones have proven to be a huge subversion of I Want My Jetpack. Not so long ago, they were placed alongside flying cars and robotic maids in the "things silly 1960s people predicted we'd have in the future" category. Now we have webcams, camera phones, and numerous other devices which are essentially videophones. They have also proven to not be the complete replacements for audio-only phones people thought they would be; for various reasons both technical (e.g. the much greater bandwidth required to do proper video) and cultural (e.g. the fact that nobody wants to be on videophone in their pajamas, while people regularly take audio-only phone calls in all kinds of odd situations, assuming that they don't simply text each other instead) they are generally reserved for situations where the video call was pre-planned. Videophones are especially popular with Japanese and Koreans whose culture demands that conversation be held eye-to-eye, and thus they are the earliest of early adopters of videophones. Videoconferencing was also more widely adopted in the West during the COVID-19 Pandemic, for similar reasons, as people could have eye contact with loved ones and business associates while maintaining physical distancing.
• In 1977, President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House as a way of encouraging energy conservation through the 1970s' energy crisis, prompting much ridicule. His successor Ronald Reagan had the panels removed during his presidency. But by the 2000s, oil prices reached record highs and given greater concern about climate change, alternative energy became more favorable. President George W. Bush installed a new set of solar panels on the White House in 2003, and President Barack Obama added more in 2013.
• After the home video market emerged in the 1980s, Blockbuster Video was the video rental store, all but holding a monopoly on the market. In 2000, entrepreneur Reed Hastings came to them with a proposal, having recently created a service that mailed DVDs directly to people's homes, he offered to set up a partnership in which he handled such a service for Blockbuster, and was laughed out of the room. He started the service as Netflix and it became a huge hit. Blockbuster attempted to copy Netflix's business model by offering DVDs by mail and eliminating late fees, but it was too little, too late, and Netflix's brand identity was too strong to overcome. Blockbuster declared bankruptcy in 2010, closed all but about 40 locations between the US and Australia in 2013, and, by 2019, had closed all of them except for a single one that was maintained mostly as a historical relic than anything. Meanwhile, Netflix would adapt to changing times by The New '10s by transitioning to video streaming, attracting the general public, rivaling the likes of HBO and AMC as amongst the most important players in original programming, and ultimately ended up as one of the most important entertainment industries of the decade.
• Motorola was once a giant in the telephone business, and led the way when cell phones took off. However, during the rise of digital receivers and transmitters, Motorola stuck to keeping everything analog, figuring there was no need to throw away the extensive and fully-functioning analog infrastructure already in place and that customers would not be interested in paying more simply to get a clearer signal. The result was that Motorola fizzled out as a company before smartphones even existed, being forced to split into Motorola Solutions (which makes walkie-talkies, video security, and such) and Motorola Mobility (which makes smartphones, after being purchased first by Google and then by Lenovo).
• The Roland TB-303 bassline synthesizer was practically stillborn. When it came out in late 1981, it seemed quite underwhelming and outdated with only one single oscillator, limited envelopes and no patch memory. It was mostly intended to be a rehearsal companion for guitar players, but still. Its VAT was $400. When it was phased out in early 1984, the store price was down to $100, or if you bought a Roland drum machine, you got a free 303. On the second-hand market, it was worth $50 or even less, so many ended up on landfills because trying to sell them wasn't worth the effort, and many of those that survived spent some time at thrift stores.
  In 1987 when analog synthesizers had been declared a dying species altogether, along came acid house that made a lot of use of the 303. Suddenly, everyone and their dog wanted to sound like that and therefore wanted a 303. Before you knew it, this little silver box was a Cult Classic, and second-hand units sold for $2,000 and more. It is now one of the most often cloned vintage synthesizers ever along with the Minimoog.
• When the TR-808 launched in 1980, it was derided for not sounding "realistic," as it used analog synthesis to generate its sounds, while the most popular drum machine at the time, the Linn Drum, used digital samples. Its price fell dramatically, which meant it could reach a new audience: the burgeoning genre of Hip-Hop. The 808's boomy kick drum and dry upper end fit perfectly with the vocal power of rap, and the device was rugged enough to be used in in streets and block parties. As Hip-Hop's popularity rose, the TR-808 kept getting more usage, until it had become one of the most sought-after piece of gear in music production. The 808 is now rightfully considered the Stratocaster of drum machines, and is still widely used by most contemporary artists. In contrast, while the Linn Drum isn't considered bad gear by any measure, it is almost exclusively used by musicians who want to emulate 80s music, as it has not aged nearly as well as its original rival.

Fashion and Apparel

• During the mid-Victorian era, many fashionable men at the time would scoff off at the ditto suit, a kind of three-piece suit that has a matching fabric and color, which was considered informal and unsuitable for day wear. Men loved it for its economic design and many more eventually gave in.
• In the spring of 1947, a rising couturier named Christian Dior launched his first line of clothing that was untypical and different from the silhouette used During the War. Some said that it was a waste of money and fabric due to wartime rationing, and the corsetting, full skirt, and high heels made it uncomfortable to wear with. Women immediately adored it and Dior's silhouette lingered on during The '50s.
• "Not one man I have spoken to likes a woman in mini skirts." – Coco Chanel, 1969. This coming from a fashion icon who revolutionized modern fashion. She also frowned upon women wearing trousers on everyday wear, because before closing and reopening her shop, pants for women were considered sportswear and negligee. This would bite her at the end of her life because these were essential articles to her suits.
  • Chanel herself had been ridiculed during her early career as her designs were considered plain at best and boring at worst by fashionistas at the time. By the end of World War I, all things bold, theatrical, and flashy, like couturier Paul Poiret's were thrown into the bin, and all eyes were now turned to Chanel, who, up to this day, is admired for her simplicity, sophistication, and innovation. A chance meeting with Poiret serves this statement:
  Poiret: To whom are you mourning, madame?
  Chanel: To you, monsieur.
  • Chanel had been ridiculed the second time when she reopened her fashion house in 1954. Competing against Christian Dior's ultra-feminine New Look silhouette, when her designs consisting of streamlined, knee-length, black-and-white tweed suits were presented in Paris, the critics ruthlessly panned it for being too plain and avant-garde. Parisians were also not too fond of Chanel for "sleeping with the enemy" during World War II. Despite all of the criticism, British and American journalists loved the designs, and it became the silhouette for the rest of the 1950s and of the early 1960s.
• When Wunderkind designer Yves Saint Laurent took over Christian Dior's fashion house the age of 21, his first collection was declared a triumph. However, in subsequent collections the young designer moved away from Dior's signature look in favor of more mod, Beatnik inspired looks that were panned. Most of Dior's clients were older and couldn't pull off Saint Laurent's styles and he was let go after being conscripted into the army ^note  This is widely thought to have been a real life incidence of Break the Cutie since Dior's owner is suspected of arranging the conscription . He and his partner sued The House of Dior's owner and won. Saint Laurent opened his own house in 1961 and his mod designs such as The Mondrian Color Block Dress and the Le Smoking women's tuxedo came to define The '60s in the way his mentor Dior's had done for The '50s. He was also the first Parisian designer to release a ready-to-wear collection, which was dismissed at the time by fashion purists, but was a spectacular success and most other houses quickly followed.
• Many people during the late 1910s-early 1920s had thought that the "bob" was merely passé before 1924 would end. By 1924, millions of young women had adopted the hairstyle in different variations◊, and it remained short for the rest of the decade, and the decade after that. And it came back in the 1960s, along with miniskirts.

Land and Water Transportation

• Volkswagen got a lot of this after the war from Ford, the Rootes Group, and a bunch of other companies from France, Britain and the United States, who all thought that the beetle-shaped "people's car" would never see the light of mass production. Sir William Rootes himself reckoned that it would fail in just two years. The Volkswagen Beetle would become one of the most iconic cars of all time, with 21,529,464 units produced from 1938–2003; while The Rootes Group was sold to Chrysler in 1967, and then to Peugeot in 1978.
• General Motors executives once derided the Toyota Prius, thinking that the hybrid tech was too expensive to be profitable at the asking price Toyota set (about $20,000 to start), that it was too small for American tastes, and that the price of gas at the time (about $2 a gallon) was so low as to make any fuel savings moot. Fast forward years later: gas prices have risen repeatedly, Toyota have sold 6.1 million and counting Prius over four generations, and many carmakers have tried their hands at making equally-successful hybrid, alternative fuel and electric cars.
• The man who invented traffic laws (William Phelps Eno) amusingly never drove a car himself. He assumed the automobile to just be a fad.
• "You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I have no time for such nonsense!" — Napoléon Bonaparte to Robert Fulton, on the subject of steamships.
  • He wasn't the only one who didn't think much of the steamboat. Until it ultimately proved successful, it was widely known as "Fulton's Folly." Admittedly, it didn't take terribly long for it to become successful: Fulton made working prototypes throughout the 1780s and 90s, had a successful demonstrator by 1810, and had people suing each other over the right to use his technology by 1820.
    • Napoleon and others weren't completely wrong. Combine a heavy and inefficient boiler prone to exploding without warning with an unreliable engine, a fragile drive system (paddle wheels can be taken out with one cannon shot), a dangerous fuel (coal dust and wood shavings can also go ka-boom without warning), a difficult to use fuel (it had to be hand shoveled into the boilers and the ash had to be dumped overboard by hand), and a wooden hull. That's a floating disaster area just waiting to happen. They didn't dismiss it out of hand because steam engines were already being used to pump water out of mines. The steam engines of the time simply weren't useful for much else.
• Ernest Seton-Thompson's autobiography states that his father wanted to become an engineer for railroad construction. However:
  My grandfather's reply was simple and final: "All nothing but nonsense. The railways are a mere fad, and will soon be done away with. Yes, within three years; and then we shall be entirely back to the horses and coaches again."
• When plans for the Shinkansen were being drawn out in the late 1950s, even people within the Japanese National Railways were unsure whether this new train line practically built from scratch^note Some of the structures and land used was bought and built before World War II, when the first Bullet Train plan was conceived but was canceled would be successful. Even the World Bank (who gave Japan credits for the capital costs) was skeptical insisting on a 210 km/h speed limit (which was raised as soon as Japan legally could). Given that this was around the time when Europe and America were ditching railways in favor of automobiles and airplanes, their doubt was somewhat understandable. Instead, it ushered in an era of global High Speed Rail expansion that seems to show no sign of slowing down as of the early 2020s.
• In the 1850s, French businessman Ferdinand de Lesseps had a dream: to build a canal from the Mediterranean Sea to the Gulf of Suez, vastly reducing shipping times from Europe to India (good for the British), Southeast Asia (good for the French, British, and Dutch), and East Asia (good for everybody). He got the necessary approvals from the Egyptian government, but when he tried to sell shares in the company building the canal in Britain and France, nobody would buy them...the public didn't think it would work. So he sweet-talked the Egyptian government into borrowing more than it could afford to fund the scheme (which, combined with unsustainable loans Egypt had taken to fund pointless and ruinous wars with Ethiopia, is why Egypt ended up part of The British Empire thirty years later). Suffice it to say, the Suez Canal was a great success, doing everything de Lesseps promised and more; it remains one of the major money earners for modern Egypt (which nationalized the Canal in 1956).
  • He had another dream, to build a canal connecting the Pacific and the Atlantic somewhere in Panama. His attempt in the 1880s failed miserably due to difficult geography, tropical diseases, and corruption. The idea was completely discredited until Americans tried it only a decade and a half later and completed the canal in 1914, albeit with a major design innovation (a system of locks—something the Americans, who had a history with running canals with locks over rugged terrain, quickly seized on. Digging all the way to the sea level, as de Lesseps tried, probably is impractical given the terrain involved).
• The Aircraft Carrier is a complicated example. There were a lot of people in the USN who thought that aircraft carriers, even if they couldn't replace battleships, were more than worth the price tag. However the American navy wasn't the forerunner of carrier technology, Japan and Britain were. Japan even failed to comprehend that aircraft carriers were the next step in naval evolution even when their own carriers were tearing up the Pacific. As a consequence, their carriers didn't receive much-needed upgrades because that would mean funding had to be diverted from battleships. And then Midway happened.
• Though the first submarine was deployed in the American Revolution, up until the 20th Century, it was seen as Awesome, but Impractical. They were typically much more dangerous to the men operating them than to any enemy. Then, in the opening weeks of World War I, the German submarine U-9 sank three British warships in less than an hour. Having a submarine with 24 men take down three cruisers and 1500 enemy sailors proved hard to resist, and the Germans quickly capitalized on their success. Ironically, Germany had been the last major naval power to build a submarine.
• Amtrak was created under Richard Nixon as a "last hurrah" of passenger rail travel in the US, to be shut down a few years down the line at the most. As of 2016, it is still going strong, carrying almost double the amount of ridership it had in the 1970s and going toe to toe with the airlines along the Northeast Corridor, where it has something approaching High Speed Rail.
• In the 1960s one Richard Beeching – then head of British Rail – believed that railroads were a thing of the past and people would soon all travel by automobile or airplane instead of the 19th-century technology that is the railway. Hence he proposed severe cuts to the rail network to keep the losses at bay. Fast forward fifty years and not only is National Rail handling more passengers than all private railroads combined ever in the history of Britain, but there is also very serious talk of expanding the network and Building High Speed Rail lines due to capacity constraints on virtually all main lines. And many stations and lines closed by the "Beeching Axe" are being reopened.
• When French automaker Citroën unveiled the newfangled 2CV as the in the 1948 Paris Motor Show as the new people's car of Postwar France, the eccentric design became the butt of many jokes and quips, with one American critic remarking "Does it come with a can opener?". However, the practicality and durability of the 2CV made it an instant success nontheless, and the design also grew on the French people, eventually becoming one of the most iconic French cars of the 20th century, lasting in production all the way until 1990.
• When Japanese automaker Subaru entered the US market by way of Philadelphia businessman Malcolm Bricklin in 1968, they made the Subaru 360 kei car their debut model for American consumers, marketed by Bricklin as "Cheap and Ugly". The model quickly gained a reputation for being unsafe and was gone from the U.S. market within two years. At that point, most people assumed Subaru would abandon the US market after the failure of the 360. Come a decade later, and Subaru is still in the US market, with a huge customer base that loves their range of cars with drive train, all-wheel drive and rough-road capabilities, especially in the winter weather-embattled Northeast.
• Before the 1930s, the London Underground map was a diagram of the network placed over a map of the city. Harry Beck, however, believed that passengers would be less interested in geographical accuracy and more interested in how to get between stations and where to change lines, so dispensed with accuracy and spaced the stations further out, which allowed the central area to be more legible and the outer fringes being shown (they had previously been simply left off). He submitted it to Frank Pick, who dismissed it due to not showing distance relative to stations. They eventually relented due to Beck's persistence - printing 500 copies and distributed them at a few central station. The public reaction was so great that they printed 700,000 copies of it, which needed a reprint. 90 years later, the map is still in use and has been used as a basis for numerous other networks and was voted one of Britain's top 10 design icons. Beck, however, was largely ignored until 1997, when Transport for London started printing "This diagram is an evolution of the original design conceived in 1931 by Harry Beck" at the bottom of every map.

Politics

• Margaret Thatcher:
  • What does Margaret Thatcher have in common with Gene Hunt from Life On Mars? Answer: She also declared in 1973 that she didn't think a woman could become British PM during her lifetime.
  • It is commonly said that, in 1987, Thatcher described Nelson Mandela's African National Congress as "a typical terrorist organization" and said, "Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government of South Africa lives in cloud-cuckoo land." She did call the ANC "a typical terrorist organization" (in response to the ANC threatening British corporations that did not boycott South Africa), but the cloud-cuckoo land comment was made by her spokesman, Bernard Ingham (and only about the prospect of the ANC coming to power through armed revolution).
• The modern election campaign process – door-knocking/canvassing, public rallies, signs, etc. – was invented by Aaron Burr in 1800 as a way of accomplishing what his party had intended to be an Impossible Task. The government generally thought Burr's methods would prove to be nothing more than a fad, which would completely disappear once they were done destroying Burr. While they did succeed in destroying Burr, his electioneering process caught on big-time.
• Richard Nixon. Two years after losing the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy, Nixon ran for governor of California against incumbent Pat Brown but was defeated by a comfortable margin. The next morning, an exhausted Nixon gave his notorious "last press conference", lashing out against the media for discrediting his candidacy. Political pundits at the time claimed Nixon's political career was over and labeled him a sore loser. ABC even aired a documentary titled The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon a few days later. Six years later Nixon won the presidency, and in 1972 was re-elected carrying 49 out of 50 states. Though his second term didn't end well...
• In 1958, a high school student named Robert G. Heft designed a new variation of the United States flag that had 50 stars to account for the addition of Hawaii and Alaska as states. He received a B-minus as a grade but agreed with his teacher that the grade would be upped to an A if it was accepted by Congress and made the official flag. Heft's design was selected from over 1,500 designs submitted, and his grade was adjusted.
• Most American school kids learn about the first ten amendments that make up the Bill of Rights, but less known is that two other amendments were proposed – one of them was about prohibiting Congress from raising their own salaries until after an election. This did not get the required ratification of 3/4 of the states needed to make it a part of the constitution, but thanks to a 1939 Supreme Court ruling (Coleman v. Miller) it didn't die and could still become an amendment if enough states ratified it. Gregory Watson was an undergraduate studying at the University of Texas at Austin, who wrote a paper in 1982, a paper in which he got a "C" from his professor because she thought it was unrealistic. Ten years later, it's now the 27th Amendment to the United States Constitution, over 200 years after it was first presented by Congress to the states for ratification, thanks in part to Watson's campaigning to have it ratified. When the professor (retired by then) heard of his successful efforts she submitted paperwork to have Watson's grade changed to an A.
  • The other forgotten amendment would set the size of the House of Representatives. By an error in its transcription, it would have been logically incoherent between a certain population margin. There has been no campaign to revive it, though some have tried.
  • A lot of subsequent proposed constitutional amendments had a time limit on the possibility of being ratified to avoid such a potentially undemocratic scenario (should the 1814 Kentucky state legislature really get much of a say on what gets added to the constitution in the 21st century?) But one of the reasons the Supreme Court accepted that an amendment proposed without an "expiry date" can be ratified and become part of the constitution even centuries after being proposed is that Congress always had the power to set such an expiry date but in some cases simply chose not to. Besides the Congressional Apportionment Amendment there are still Three proposed amendments definitely pending but for various political (not legal) reasons their passage seems extremly unlikely. One would've constitutionally protected slavery, another would've constitutionally outlawed child labor (a nice sentiment but since deemed by SCOTUS to be contained already in other parts of the constitution and also enforced via non-constitutional legislation) and another handles the no longer very relevant question of whether someone can remain a U.S. citizen after accepting a foreign Title of Nobility. The Equal Rights Amendment had an expiry date (which was extended once) and failed to get ratified, but there is a push to retroactively eliminate the expiry date and get it ratified through the backdoor. We'll update this page if this goes anywhere, but suffice it to say, if it does, it'd be a prime example of the trope discussed on this page.
• Arkansas governor Bill Clinton was considered a rising star in the Democratic Party in 1988 and was given a prime time speaking slot at the national convention. He gave a long, boring speech that even drew boos at one point – the Los Angeles Times referred to the speech as "nationally televised political suicide". After that, pundits agreed that he ruined whatever tiny chance he might have of ever becoming president. Four years later...
• In January of 1989, Erich Honecker declared that the Berlin Wall would stand for a hundred more years. It fell that November.
  • In 1982, Brezhnev declared that "the unity of the Soviet Republics is stronger than ever". Within a decade the USSR had dissolved into independent states.^note Although admittedly telling the world that your country is about to fall apart is never a good idea even if it's true. Especially when your most bitter enemy is looking for any chance to destroy you.
• Unlike the vast majority of European intelligentsia of the time, the Spanish PM Count of Aranda predicted in 1783 that the newborn United States was not just going to last, but also become an expansionist, great power in the future, and that its very existence would stimulate the Spanish colonies to become independent nations of their own. As a preventive maneuver, Aranda advised King Charles III to divide the colonies between his sons and turn them into different kingdoms that would be tied in a web of alliances and look up to their Spanish counterpart as their superior, who would take the title of Emperor, with only the islands retained under direct Spanish leadership. The King responded that Aranda was exaggerating and that this kind of reforms was not needed. A century later, Spain only controlled the insular parts of its American empire, and soon after lost them to the United States.
  • Aranda's suggestion also presaged somewhat how the British Empire, and later, Commonwealth would operate: a system of independent states joined together through the British Monarchy (although the differences in details are quite substantial).
• This◊ 1924 New York Times article. In 1932 Blum and other French politicians thought Adolf Hitler would never have the chance to be in power after his recent electoral setbacks. In fairness to them, had the German conservatives not tried to use Hitler to prevent their own electoral collapse they'd have been right — by 1932 the Nazi party's support was waning and it was thought to be almost bankrupt (on the other hand, the decline was relative, as Nazis still held the largest parliamentary group even despite setbacks).
• According to many historical accounts, Commodore Matthew C. Perry apparently didn't think very highly of his assignment from the US Navy in 1853 to help open diplomatic channels with a heavily isolated East Asian island chain that most Americans knew nothing about; like any good military man, he wanted a distinguished assignment that was likely to get him noticed by his superiors, and saw no reason to believe that his mission would ever be more than a historical footnote. Today, we know that island chain as Japan, and we know that assignment as the Perry Expedition—the event that led directly to the Meiji Restoration and put Japan on the road to becoming one of the most important industrial superpowers of the 20th century.
• The Labour Party leadership elections 2015 had four candidates: the center-left candidates Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper, the centrist candidate Liz Kendall, and the elderly, veteran, unapologetically socialist, anti-war and anti-nuclear campaigner and MP Jeremy Corbyn. Virtually everyone said that Corbyn had absolutely no chance, that his brand of politics had been dead since the 1980s and the membership wouldn't vote for anyone so utterly alien to mainstream UK politics. Such people promptly ate their words when Corbyn won handily with 59.5% of the vote. Not only that but in the snap elections of 2017 (which were predicted to be a Tory walk by the time they were called), Corbyn managed a better result for Labour than his two predecessors as leader and forced the Tories into a confidence and supply deal with the DUP.
• When Donald Trump declared his candidacy for the 2016 US presidential election, almost everyone considered it a publicity stunt — mainly due to him not being a politician and his habit of making inflammatory public statements, which largely contributed to him ultimately deciding not to run in the 2012 election. He ended up being unexpectedly popular with a plurality of Republicans, building a supporter base among conservatives unsatisfied with the Republican party establishment; he was the frontrunner throughout the primary elections, and ultimately not only won the Republican nomination, but went on to upset the heavily-favored Hillary Clinton in the general election to become the 45th President of the United States.
• Angela Merkel was seen as a non-entity and a political nobody when she was appointed as minister for women and youth (not families, which this ministry is usually in charge of, too but wasn't at the time) mostly to have a woman from the East in the first post-reunification cabinet. After the 1998 election loss of Kohl to Schröder, Merkel lost her job as minister of the environment and was seen by some as done for politically. However, a political donation scandal engulfed much of the West German leadership of her party and she could step in and sweep up (coincidentally at the same time the political career of Wolfgang Schäuble was considered over due to the scandal and he went on to serve as perhaps one of the most influential interior minister and later finance minister in post-war German history and took over as speaker of parliament after the 2017 elections) When she "lost" the spot of chancellor candidate in 2002 to Edmund Stoiber (and Stoiber promptly lost the election) people also were about to write her political obituary, but it was only in 2005 when with her at the helm, the CDU barely limped into first place, but Schröder gave a rambling, arrogant and disconnected from reality performance at a post-election press conference, costing him any credibility to lead a government, causing his party to enter into a grand coalition under Merkel's leadership. Merkel governed until 2021.
• Shinzo Abe
  • After an embarrassing tenure rife with scandals as Prime Minister of Japan (which lasted a year until he came down with ulcerative colitis) that eventually led to their party's demise in the 2009 General Election, not even members within the Liberal Democratic Party thought he would win when he announced he would once again run for the party's leadership election, and many favored Shigeru Ishiba and Nobuteru Ishihara as the more likely party leader that will face the increasingly faltering Democrats come the next General Election. However, Abe managed to secure votes of several factions and came in second in the first vote, forcing the election into a run-off. He then managed to convince the party members who voted for Ishihara to vote for him, allowing him to become the first LDP leader to be voted back in after resignation.
  • Even after this, many political experts and pundits, who remembered how short his last tenure was, did not expect him to stick around as the PM for long^note Him coming back as the Prime Minister was a given as soon as he won the leadership election, as by that point the Democrats were splintering into several parties and were falling apart. Abe remained in office for over seven and a half years, becoming the longest-serving Japanese PM in history, before announcing his resignation in 2020 due to health problems.
• When Vladimir Putin became Boris Yeltsin's prime minister in 1999, hardly anyone knew who he was, and no one believed he would amount to anything (Yeltsin was going through primes at quite the rate at the time), aside from a statement by some guy from LDPR (the Russian party of trolls). Not so much with him finishing his second decade in power...
• After Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, he thought his speech had been a failure and would be forgotten. (He also stated in the speech: "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here...") Nowadays, it is one of the most famous speeches in world history.
• When former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden announced that he was seeking the nomination for Democratic candidate for President in 2020, he was viewed as a long-shot. He'd already made two unsuccessful presidential bids, the first of which ended in a plagiarism allegation. As a longtime establishment centrist Democrat facing a party electorate dominated by young left-leaning voters (although this actually turned out to be an advantage in courting the many independent and Republican voters dissatisfied with his opponent), and, at age 77, someone who, if elected, would be the oldest President in history, it was thought that his campaign would fizzle out at the primary level. But unexpected strong performances in the early primaries netted Biden the nomination. While Donald Trump was still considered a highly divisive figure, many observers, both left and right, still thought Biden's history of gaffes, advanced age, and the natural advantage that Trump would have as an incumbent all lessened Biden's chances. But after an arduous campaign combined with a multiple-day vote count, Biden clinched the presidency, rebuilding the "Blue Wall" of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that Trump won in 2016 with the largest popular vote count in the history of the country, flipping the Republican strongholds of Arizona and Georgia.
• Prior to the above, during the 2020 COVID Pandemic, Donald Trump made a statement about the possibility of cleaning and re-using certain types of masks instead of just throwing them all away. The media balked at the statement at the time, thinking it was just more evidence of his inability to handle the outbreak. However, mere days later, a lab announced that they had figured out exactly how to do it, and within weeks, re-usable masks were available to anyone. Although most are still thrown away, the process needed to clean and reuse a mask meant Hospitals and labs could maintain a healthy supply while the demand outside of the Hospitals skyrocketed.
• During the 2022 United States elections of the House of Representatives and Senate, it was widely believed that Republicans would make huge gains, with some dubbing the predicted wins as "the Red Wave". Prior to the elections, Democrats had been reportedly lagging in polls on numerous issues, often being cited as the main blame in certain troubles of certain situations. The 2022 elections ended with Democrats holding a majority in the Senate, even flipping a red state, and while they aren't the House majority, they still fared better than most expected.

Other

• The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation, published in 1984 by Christopher Cerf and Victor Nevasky, is a book of quotations by experts who ended up being wrong, either through a lack of information or a lack of imagination. Lord Kelvin practically gets a section of his own.
• After Darwin's paper on Natural Selection — the precursor to On the Origin of Species — was first made public before the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858, Thomas Bell later remarked in the annual presidential report presented in May 1859 that "The year which has passed has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear." And to some degree, he was right — scientists had long suspected that evolution was happening, and all kinds of mechanisms had been suggested before. Natural selection went into a long recession not that long afterward, as it wasn't until the (re)discovery of Mendelian genetics that anyone could figure out how new traits could be passed down without being diluted out of existence.
• According to legend, Fred Smith, later founder of FedEx, pitched his idea for a mailing company as a college assignment and failed it because the teacher found it "unrealistic" or "unworkable".
  "I don't really remember what grade I got. I probably didn't get a good one though, because it wasn't a very well thought out paper." — Fred Smith on his college paper.
• In 1930, Robert Millikan, of the oil drop experiment fame, wrote in his book Science and the New Civilization that liberating energy from the disintegration of atoms was "from the one point of view a childish Utopian dream and from the other a foolish bugaboo." Fifteen years later, he was proven wrong in the most spectacular possible way.
• JEM Rubber Co offered the idea of the whoopee cushion to S.S. Adams Co. but was rejected, with Adams claiming it was "too vulgar" and would never sell. Instead, the Johnson Smith Company accepted the offer and sold them to great success. Adams went on to copy them with the Razzberry Cushions.
• There once was a young man who wasn't quite sure about which subject he should study. He was torn between music and physics. One professor he approached about this problem urged him to take music because in the field of physics "everything has already been discovered". Despite this, the young man decided to become a physicist. 45 years later, the not-so-young-anymore man — whose name was Max Planck — received a Nobel Prize. Today, he's known as one of the main people responsible for discovering quantum physics and has several institutes, a prize, and a physical constant named after him.
• Wendy's founder Dave Thomas said in one interview that he had never expected Wendy's to have more than five locations at most. As of 2010, he was off by about 6,650.
• Heinz Guderian mentioned few times in his different books that he had a hard time convincing higher-ups in German military about the concept of mobile warfare and wide use of tanks. Everyone rebuked him with lines close to "Tanks and trucks? Just a fad, cavalry is the only mobile force needed". And that was after World War I, the same war that proved just how much cavalry is useless in modern combat (the poor horses can never carry enough armor to avoid getting torn to shreds by modern weapons, and "mounted infantry" provide few advantages different from motorized or mechanized infantry). Now try to find a person who won't connect Blitzkrieg tactics with Nazi Germany.
  • Guderian's role in the development of the German tank arm is much exaggerated. While his book Achtung Panzer was indeed revolutionary, it was also his first publication on tank warfare, published only in 1937. During the early 1920s, other German military officers, such as Ernst Volckheim (who led the first experimental German tank unit into battle during World War I), were already formulating parameters of the future German tank arm and they were influential enough for the top brass to set up a secret test center in Russia where they could experiment on tank designs and tactics with the Soviets.
  • The actual innovation that Guderian proposed was using tanks as a separate unit while supported by infantry. Standard tank doctrine dating back to WWI was that tanks were to be widely dispersed to support infantry, envisioning them as helping infantry units to break through trenches. Many other military minds had advocated the same thing, but Guderian gets a lot of the credit for actually putting it into practice in Poland and especially in France where his tactics defeated a much larger army in a far shorter time period than anyone expected (with helpful assists from a panicked French government).
  • It is also debatable whether or not there was a concept of "Blitzkrieg" as an overall doctrine. Guderian's main contributions were tactical: the strategy of maneuver warfare was familiar to the German military, and it could be argued that this was merely a technological evolution of doctrines dating from the mid-19th century.
    • Blitzkrieg was born of necessity rather than previous innovation. Hitler demanded the successful invasion of Poland and France (something that Germany spent four years and millions of lives trying to do during WWI). To top it all off, the German industry was incapable at the time of supporting a total war, meaning if it wasn't done quickly, it wouldn't be done at all. Nobody expected such a crazy plan to work, yet it did. In fact, most of Germany's top military officials at the time didn't even want a war because they were afraid that Germany was going to lose badly if it did happen. So they put up an idea that they thought would turn him off of the idea: another round of trench warfare like what had happened in World War One. Unfortunately for them, a single maverick glory-seeking general decided to put up his own plan, which was the exact opposite of what everyone else was proposing.
• In the eighteenth century, Thomas Malthus became one of the first people to raise concern about the danger of overpopulation. He predicted that the world would run out of food by 1890. Although, to be fair, a modified version of Malthus' theory did gain some currency in the 20th century, seeming plausible until the Green Revolution. Generally now the issue isn't food production so much, but distribution (which is largely a political, not technological, problem), or the growing problem of ocean dead zones.
• When Ronnie Barrett was attempting to develop the now-famous .50-caliber anti-materiel rifle that shares his name early in The '80s, he ran into this hurdle. After sketching what the weapon would look like, he approached multiple machine shops with his design. Almost everyone he visited told him that if such a weapon was in any way a good idea, someone smarter would have already designed it.
• An Italian immigrant to the US once thought up an idea for a centralized commercial and residential telephone directory, "The Trader's Guide", but everyone shot him down – that is, except a Spanish telephone company, who replied him using an International Reply Coupon (IRC). Thus, he, after discovering that such IRCs were paid at the cost of postage in the country of origin and could be exchanged for stamps in the country of redemption, and that post-WWI inflation had devalued the US$ value of stamps in his country, Italy, so that he could make over 400% profit, he borrowed money and asked relatives in Italy to send him some IRCs. However, he ran into some red tape, so he asked his friends to invest some money in his idea. It would grow and grow so many times over that he became rich and didn't bother with IRCs anymore – he just repaid older investors with money from newer ones. This collapsed and the immigrant's name, Charles Ponzi, would become forever associated with similar schemes. Later, the Yellow Pages were introduced, taking influence from Ponzi's Trader's Guide.
• In 1962, Lou Groen created the Filet-O-Fish, a fish burger with cheese for McDonald's, in response to Catholics not eating red meat on Fridays. However, company owner Ray Kroc thought the Filet-O-Fish would never sell and believed his own burger, the Hula Burger, a burger with grilled pineapple and cheese, would be a much bigger hit. Both men made a bet where they sold their burgers in two different locations to see who can sell the most, with the winner getting their burger added to the McDonald's menu. As you can guess, Groen won the bet. And to add insult to injury for Kroc, not only was the Filet-O-Fish a hit with Catholics but also with Muslims and Jews as well because it adheres to their dietary laws.
• The Japanese Chindōgu is about making useless inventions, like duster slippers for a cat so that it can clean the floor while walking. A book on these came out in 1995... it included the selfie stick.
• Paul Winchell, best known as the first voice of Tigger, was an inventor as well as an actor and in 1963 he attempted to patent the idea of disposable razors. At the time disposable razor blades were common, but the idea of a full razor that would be used only once and be thrown away was ridiculous so the patent was refused.
• Cicero once outlined the various theories about how matter and the universe are structured, detailing evidence for and against each one... except for Democritus's atomic theory, which he felt was so obviously wrong he didn't need to bother disproving it. This turned out closest to modern physics.
• When Cassander founded some cities, he believed that his city, Cassandreia, would flourish in the next years and that his wife's city, Thessalonica, would remain irrelevant. Turns out that the opposite happened and Thessaloniki remained an important centre of the Greek world, not only in the Byzantine times (where it was the second most important city after Constantinople and it was called "co-reigning" city) but in modern times, where it's the second most important city after Athens (the Greeks call her "co-capital").
• Nobody expected wrestler Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's acting career to go anywhere. Despite a misstep or two early in his Hollywood days, The Rock of today is a bonafide movie star and consistent box office draw.
• In 1983, a renowned ice dancing team debuted a free dance so risky and cutting-edge that common wisdom said it would either tank their medal chances, or get them disqualified altogether. It was called "Bolero", and it won Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean Olympic gold medals, the only complete set of perfect scores ever awarded in figure skating, the hearts of millions around the world, and an enduring place in the pantheon of Greatest Athletes of All Time.
• In the 1970s, a chess player named Nigel Povah showed his friend a new opening strategy he came up with. The friend said "If that works then I'm a monkey's bum!" The name stuck.

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