5 Expert Predictions That Were Completely Wrong

We have all been there. You think that one thing will happen, and something completely different happens instead. Everyone makes the wrong call at some point. It happens to the best of us and, sadly, will continue to happen, no matter how smart we think we are. Even experts in every field you can possibly imagine have said things that turned out to be completely false, much to the amusement of the public and the experts’ competitors. Here are five predictions that were made by experts, but that turned out to be hopelessly inaccurate.


5. The New York Times

“A rocket will never be able to leave Earth’s atmosphere.” The New York Times published that sentence in 1936, and just three decades later, they were kicking themselves. To be fair, at the time, plenty of people thought the race to space was a hoax. These days, NASA is one of the most respected and recognizable government funded organizations in the world.


4. Erasmus Wilson

Anybody named “Erasmus” has got to be nerdy enough to know better than to say what Oxford Professor Erasmus Wilson said about electricity. In 1878, Wilson said “When the Paris Exhibition closes, electric light will close with it and no more will be heard of it.”


3. Napoleon Bonaparte

In the 1800s, a steamboat must have seemed like a strange concept, but French conqueror Napoleon Bonaparte went a step further, saying “How, sir, would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I pray you, excuse me, I have not the time to listen to such nonsense.”


2. Darryl Zanuck

Darryl Zanuck, a film producer for 20th Century Fox, was not easily swayed by the rise in demand for syndicated TV shows. In 1946, he said, “Television won’t last because people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” If only he could see how obsessively people fill up their Netflix queues.


1. Hiram Maxim

Machine guns, as controversial as they may be nowadays, was even more prone to debate when it was first invented in 1893. Machine gun inventor Hiram Maxim was asked if the weapon would make war more terrible. His response was “No, it will make war impossible.”