History's boldest predictions, aged to perfection.
In the 1950s, nuclear boosters swore up and down that splitting atoms would make electricity so ridiculously cheap that utilities would just give it away for free. Spoiler alert: your monthly electric bill suggests they may have been slightly off in their calculations.
Since 1964, experts have been warning that robots are about to steal every American job within the next five years. Spoiler alert: we're still waiting for the unemployment apocalypse that's been perpetually scheduled for next Tuesday.
In the 1970s, federal agencies and oil experts confidently predicted America would be bone-dry of petroleum by 1990. They had charts, graphs, and very serious mustaches to prove it. Then horizontal drilling said 'hold my beer.'
In 1967, a remarkable collection of futurists, marketers, and social scientists — almost all of them men — sat down to predict what the American woman would want, buy, and care about by the turn of the millennium. They were detailed. They were confident. They were spectacularly, almost impressively wrong. We have the quotes.
When television arrived in American living rooms in the late 1940s, the nation's educators, intellectuals, and civic leaders greeted it as a miracle of democratic enlightenment. Opera for the masses. Literature on demand. A nation uplifted by the glowing rectangle in the corner. This is the story of that optimism, held at arm's length and examined with great tenderness before the Nielsen ratings arrive.
For six decades, the smartest people in American business have been absolutely certain that paper was finished. They were wrong in the 1960s, wrong in the 1970s, catastrophically wrong in the 1980s, and somehow most wrong of all in the 1990s — right before paper consumption hit an all-time high. The memo outlasted everyone who predicted its death.
Since roughly the time your grandfather was learning to drive, Americans have been promised a flying car within the next few years. The promise has been made by engineers, entrepreneurs, magazine editors, and at least one person who definitely should have known better. We tracked every major instance. The results are not encouraging, but they are extremely funny.
In 1953, a peculiar inventor and publisher named Hugo Gernsback described, in remarkable detail, a handheld wireless device that could send messages, display information, and connect people across vast distances. America responded by largely ignoring him. This is our formal apology, issued only seven decades late.
In 1995, some of America's sharpest CEOs, journalists, and academics looked at the World Wide Web and saw absolutely nothing worth worrying about. We found their quotes, dusted them off, and built a scoring system to rank exactly how wrong they were. Spoiler: several of them later ran companies that would have ceased to exist without the thing they mocked.
In 1900, a civil engineer named John Elfreth Watkins Jr. sat down and wrote a list of predictions for what life would look like in the year 2000. Some of them were visionary. Some were completely unhinged. And one of them — one glorious, eerily specific one — should have made the man a household name.
Somewhere in a filing cabinet that nobody has opened since 1987, there are think tank reports confidently declaring that the traditional American office would be obsolete by the mid-1980s. They were wrong, of course. Or were they just catastrophically, almost impressively, early? COVID-19 may have just retroactively vindicated a generation of futurists who severely underestimated the gravitational pull of the office parking lot.
Throughout history, a parade of confident experts, industry analysts, and very serious journalists have declared certain behaviors categorically un-American. Paying for water. Talking to a cylinder on your kitchen counter. Letting a computer handle your money. Every single time, Americans looked at the expert consensus and said: hold my (expensive bottled) beer.
In 1995, astronomer Clifford Stoll published a Newsweek column confidently explaining why the internet would never replace real commerce, real community, or real anything. He was spectacularly wrong. The uncomfortable part? His reasoning was almost coherent.
For eight consecutive decades, engineers, investors, and magazine editors have solemnly promised that flying cars are just twenty years away. Mathematically speaking, that means they were due in 1945. We're still waiting. Chester Wrongwright investigates humanity's most stubborn, most expensive, and most aeronautically challenged broken promise.
In 1967, RAND Corporation analyst Herman Kahn mapped out the technological landscape of the year 2000 with uncanny accuracy — lasers fixing your eyeballs, satellites beaming TV into your living room, shopping from a screen in your kitchen. The one thing he got catastrophically, almost insultingly wrong? He thought all that technology would give Americans more time off. Bless his heart.
Once the undisputed king of social news, Digg managed to fumble its throne so spectacularly that it became a cautionary tale taught in business schools. Here's the full, gloriously messy story of how one website rose to the top of the internet, handed everything to a competitor on a silver platter, and then spent the next decade trying to remember what it was good at.