TL;DR · Executive summary
- 14 confident statements by experts that turned out to be spectacularly wrong – from railways and surgery to the atomic bomb.
- The problem is not that we don't know something. The problem is when we think we know it for certain.
- A healthy approach: respect for experts, but not blind faith in their infallibility. Verify, question, think for yourself.
Which is why I find this question so interesting: “Which of today’s confident claims will future generations shake their heads at – the same way we do now at these statements from the past?”
Here are 14 bold predictions that ultimately flopped.
1828 – “Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, being unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.”
Dr. Dionysius Lardner, Irish scientist
1839 – “The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it. ‘Knife’ and ‘pain’ are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient.”
Dr. Alfred Velpeau, French surgeon
1857 – “It is time to stop the nonsense about hand-washing.”
Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift, a prestigious Austrian medical journal – on evidence that dirty hands might be the main source of infection during surgery
1889 – “Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever.”
Thomas Edison, American inventor
1895 – “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”
Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the Royal Society
1899 – “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of the US Patent Office
1911 – “Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.”
Ferdinand Foch, French general
1929 – “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
Irving Fisher, American economist – three days before the crash that started the Great Depression
1933 – “There will never be a bigger plane built.”
A Boeing engineer – after the maiden flight of the 10-seat Boeing 247
1933 – “The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.”
Lord Ernest Rutherford, British physicist
1945 – “That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.”
Admiral William D. Leahy – on the American atomic bomb project
1954 – “If excessive smoking actually plays a role in the production of lung cancer, it seems to be a minor one.”
Dr. Wilhelm C. Hueper, Director of the US National Cancer Institute
1958 – “Distaval can be given with complete safety to pregnant women and nursing mothers without adverse effect on mother or child.”
Official advertisement for thalidomide, whose side effects harmed more than 100,000 children
2021 – … ?
Conclusion
What interests me about these quotes is not so much the error itself, but the certainty with which they were uttered.
Because the problem often is not that we don’t know something. The problem arises when we think we know it for sure.
Perhaps the healthy approach is to respect experts, but not to have blind faith in their infallibility. To verify things. To doubt. To think for yourself. And when something simply doesn’t add up, not to be afraid to ask:
“What if it’s different?”
Even if it’s the greatest authority in the room who made the claim.