Spectacularly Wrong Predictions

Spectacularly Wrong Predictions

Radical Predictions That Fell Flat
Don’t make too many plans for Saturday, May 21, 2011. According to Family Radio president Harold Camping, the Rapture is happening that day, followed by the complete destruction of the universe six months later.

Clearly, this is not the first doomsday scenario ever predicted. In fact, it’s not even the first doomsday scenario predicted by Camping, who last said that the Rapture was coming in 1994. Will his latest prediction be as spectacularly wrong as the last one? Only time will tell.

14 spectacularly wrong predictions.



#1. 1929 Stock Market


Irving Fisher was a noted 20th century economist. No less an authority than Milton Friedman called him "the greatest economist the United States has ever produced," and many of his contributions to economics, such as the Fisher equation, the Fisher hypothesis and the Fisher separation theorem are cited by economists to this day.

Yet despite his intellect, he made one statement in 1929 that destroyed his credibility for the rest of his life.

Three days before the Wall Street Crash of that year, he claimed that, " s tocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." When he was disproved 72 hours later, he tried to get out from under the statement, but months of putting a positive spin on developments only further eroded his reputation. He died in 1947, but a renewed interest in neoclassical economics in the 1950s caused a re-evaluation of his work and a rehabilitation of his name.

#2. Y2K


When it comes to global catastrophes that weren’t, Y2K is one of the all-time greats. As the year 2000 approached, computer experts realized that a potential problem existed. Most software was written with the last two digits representing the year as opposed to all four digits, so “1998” was written simply as “98.”

When the new millennium rang in, they feared, computers the world over would behave as if the year had changed from 1999 to 1900 — and there was no way to predict the possible consequences.

While this situation was a particular problem for the financial industry, paranoia took hold in every sector. Some people believed that all of their personal data would be compromised, that database snafus would cause food shortages and that nuclear missiles would launch themselves. Edmund X. DeJesus, editor of BYTE magazine, joined in the fray, stating that “Y2K is a crisis without precedent in human history.”

Fortunately, Jan. 1, 2000 came and went without any major incidents.

#3. 2010 Collapse of the United States


In 1998, Russian political writer Igor Panarin claimed that the United States was on the verge of civil war, which would result in wealthier states withholding tax revenue from the federal government and seceding from the union. After the resulting collapse of the nation , predicted for 2010, it would be split into six parts and divided up by the newly dominant world powers.

In a 2008 article in The Wall Street Journal, Panarin explained that under the restructuring, the west coast would be controlled by China, Hawaii by Japan, the southeast would become part of Mexico, the northern Midwest would go to Canada, the northeast would join the European Union , and Russia would get Alaska. He said, "There's a 55 to 45 percent chance right now that disintegration will occur.”

#4. Dow 36,000


Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market is a book written by James Glassman and Kevin Hassett. Published in 1999, it is an unmistakable product of a time when a bursting dot-com bubble was unimaginable, and irrational exuberance was contagious. The book’s premise was that the boom times would cause the Dow Jones Industrial Average to rise to 36,000 within just a few years, and it offered advice on how best to cash in on this eventuality.

The book’s introduction states: “If you are worried about missing the market's big move upward, you will discover that it is not too late. Stocks are now in the midst of a one-time-only rise to much higher ground–to the neighborhood of 36,000 on the Dow Jones Industrial Average." Sadly, it didn’t exactly work out this way. Today, a used paperback copy of the now out-of-print book can be purchased on Amazon for as little as one cent, at the time of this writing.

#5. Online Shopping


In 1966, Time magazine ran a bold prediction: “Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop - because women like to get out of the house, like to handle merchandise, like to be able to change their minds.”

While it is true that in 2011, many people still like to leave their homes and see products first-hand, this prediction was way off the mark and becomes more so every year. Consider the ever-increasing popularity of the annual Cyber Monday after Thanksgiving.

The most damning statistic was cited in Minnesota’s Herald Journal, which quoted a study by the independent research company Forrester Forecast. The 2010 study projected that approximately $173 billion would be spent in total online shopping sales in the U.S. that year.

#6. Television


A 2010 study by the A.C. Nielsen Co. found that the average American watches almost 5 hours of television a day. Many households have more than one set, so that families aren’t besieged with conflict as their members attempt compromise on whether to watch 24 or the Justin Bieber concert. However, in 1946, studio executive Darryl F Zanuck couldn’t imagine television getting much traction in the marketplace.


"Television won't be able to hold onto any market it captures after the first six months,” he predicted. “People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." Zanuck wasn’t the only person to get it wrong. The New York Times ran an article in 1939 that said, “The problem of TV was that people had to glue their eyes to a screen, and that the average American wouldn’t have time for it.”

#7. Rocket Mail


Arthur Summerfield was U.S. Postmaster General under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He is perhaps best known for a prediction he made in 1959. “Before man reaches the moon,” he said, “your mail will be delivered within hours from New York to Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail.” For anyone waiting for that special package from Amazon, this must sound like a tantalizing proposition — and it was briefly under development.

In the same year Summerfield made his bold prediction, the U.S. Post Office tested “Missile Mail” for the first and last time. A rocket was launched from the submarine Barbero off the coast of Florida to a naval base in Mayport. The entire trip lasted 22 minutes, and the two mail containers it carried were delivered successfully. Sadly, the program was never implemented.

#8. Mother Shipton


Ursula Southeil was a 16th century English clairvoyant and mystic who went by the name Mother Shipton. She died in 1561, and 80 years later, a book of her prophecies was published. She predicted many different events, all in a style so vague that they could mean just about anything. One couplet, however, was very specific, and it read, "The end of the world will surely come, in eighteen hundred and eighty one."

1881 came and went, but her wildly inaccurate prediction failed to discredit her. From the time her prophecies were first published until the 19th century, she was credited with predicting various calamities, and fortune-tellers would put her statue outside their place of business, thereby lending themselves soothsaying credibility. A pub in her native town of Knaresborough and another in Portsmouth both have life size statues of her as well.

#9. Atomic Energy


Winston Churchill was the British prime minister during World War II, and his unwavering example provided the citizenry with much-needed leadership in a frightening time. Today he is considered one of the greatest wartime leaders of the 20th century, and after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, his name was frequently invoked when describing the leadership of New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Whatever his leadership capabilities may have been, however, they didn’t do much for his knowledge of atomic energy. In 1939, as the technology was being tested for use in future weaponry, Churchill remained unimpressed with its capabilities in combat. “Atomic energy might be as good as our present-day explosives,” he said, “but it is unlikely to produce anything very much more dangerous.”

Six years later, the first atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of people and causing the unconditional surrender of Japan one week later.

#10. The Internet


Robert Metcalfe is the founder of the 3Com digital electronics company and a professor at The University of Texas at Austin. He holds a PhD from Harvard, is the co-inventor of Ethernet , and holds a Grace Murray Hopper Award for developing it. Today he is a General Partner at Polaris Venture Partners, a venture capital firm that specializes in early investments in technology companies.

Despite his impressive resume, Robert Metcalfe is known for at least one inaccurate prediction that he is unlikely to live down. In a 1995 issue of InfoWorld, he famously said of the Internet that it “will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” He then promised to eat his words if proven wrong. He was. So during his keynote speech at the WWW International Conference in 1997, he produced the magazine page containing the quote, put it in a blender, and ingested it before a live audience.

#11. Communism


From 1953 to 1964, Nikita Khrushchev led the Soviet Union. He was responsible for relaxing some of the more draconian elements of Stalinist domestic policy, and he was also an early supporter of the Soviet space program. However, what most people remember about him was when he pounded his shoe on the table at the United Nations in 1960. This outburst was typical of the flamboyant behavior he exhibited whenever he had a microphone in front of him.

One such outburst occurred in 1956, when he was addressing Western ambassadors at the Polish embassy in Moscow. Khrushchev was as combative as ever, and he told the ambassadors gathered there that Communism’s defeat of capitalism was inevitable. “History is on our side,” he said. “We will bury you.” Thirty-three years later, Communism collapsed, and two years after that the Soviet Union was dissolved.

#12. The Titanic


Nearly 100 years after its sinking, the luxury passenger ship Titanic remains a classic example of human arrogance. Many people made many regrettable statements prior to its doomed maiden voyage, all of which were spectacularly and fatally wrong. Among them was the ship’s captain, Edward J. Smith, who said, “I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern ship building has gone beyond that."

Not to be outdone was Phillip Franklin, vice president of the White Star Line, which had produced the ship. Prior to the voyage, he said, "There is no danger that Titanic will sink. The boat is unsinkable and nothing but inconvenience will be suffered by the passengers." After the accident, a penitent Phillip Franklin walked back his remarks. "I thought her unsinkable and I based my opinion on the best expert advice."

#13. The Beatles


Almost 50 years on, it’s hard to believe there was a time when not everyone liked the Beatles. In fact, quite a few people hated them and found their music as appealing as nails on the chalkboard. For example, in 1964, National Review founder William F. Buckley described them as “so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music.”

When Decca Records rejected them after their 1962 audition, they famously said, "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." However, the most spectacularly wrong prediction ever made about them comes from Ray Bloch, musical director for The Ed Sullivan Show, who said, "The only thing different is the hair, as far as I can see. I give them a year."

#14. Pearl Harbor


Prior to U.S. involvement in World War II, Japan had been conquering land in Asia for almost a decade. The next target on their list was the Philippines, but the U.S. had troops stationed there, so Japan could not attack it without provoking a military response.

The Japanese decided to pre-emptively attack the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the likely origin of an American military response. After it was destroyed, the Japanese believed they could conquer the Philippines without any interference.

While the notion of an attack against the U.S. Naval fleet was unthinkable to most Americans, U.S. intelligence had information suggesting the Japanese might be up to something, but it was not known where or when. However, Frank Knox, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, made a statement on Dec. 4, 1941, to assure everyone that the situation was well in hand. “Whatever happens,” he said, “the U.S. Navy is not going to be caught napping.” The attack on Pearl Harbor occurred three days later.
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