Duh? Finally

For a little lighter fare from John Kelly at WaPo.

HISTORY’S MOST BONEHEADED PREDICTIONS WERE COMPILED IN THIS REPORT

Few things in life are as satisfying as serving up a heaping helping of “I told you so.”

Something like that must have been on the mind of the U.S. politician or bureaucrat who in the mid-1960s commissioned a wonderfully readable 48-page government report known internally as “The Erroneous Predictions Multilith.”

The document was produced by the Legislative Reference Service — what we today call the Congressional Research Service — and it is a compilation of some of history’s most spectacularly wrong forecasts. (Why “multilith”? That refers to the printing process used to produce such publications.)

The full title of the report is “Erroneous Predictions and Negative Comments Concerning Exploration, Territorial Expansion, Scientific and Technological Development; Selected Statements.”

* * *  

We’ll get to that, but first, here’s a taste of “The Erroneous Predictions Multilith.” It starts in 1486 with the royal committee that advised the king and queen of Spain not to fund a numskull named Christopher Columbus. Sailing west to Asia, the committee insisted, would take an impossibly long three years. And, besides, there was nothing between Europe and that destination but a vast, featureless ocean.

Speaking of vast and featureless, nearly 400 years later, New York Rep. Orange Ferriss couldn’t believe the United States paid Russia $7 million for the Alaska Territories. “Of what possible commercial importance can this territory be to us?” he fumed in Congress.

* * * 

Three decades earlier, Sen. Simon Cameronof Pennsylvania wondered why Congress was being asked to fund the Smithsonian Institution. “I am tired of all this thing called science here,” Cameron said.

Wrong calls on technology make especially delicious reading now.

Writing about airplanes in the March 1904 issue of Popular Science Monthly, Octave Chanute proclaimed: “The machines will eventually be fast, they will be used in sport, but they are not to be thought of as commercial carriers.”

* * *

Anyway, back to the report. In 1839, the French surgeon Alfred Velpeauwrote that he saw no future for anesthesia, insisting that “ ‘Knife’ and ‘pain’ are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient.”

There’s even a section on early opposition to vaccination. Edward Jenner’s attempts to use relatively harmless cowpox to prevent deadly smallpox prompted one 18th-century doctor to complain: “Smallpox is a visitation from God, but the cowpox is produced by presumptuous man; the former was what Heaven ordained, the latter is, perhaps, a daring violation of our holy religion.”

The more things change, eh?

Isaac Newton said that he was able to make his discoveries only by standing upon the shoulders of giants. All too often, we have to stand under the heels of idiots.

The piece is more extensive than the excerpts I included, and is worth the read for a chuckle.

BiD, vote with your feet (money) fly United?