The truth about predictions

When it comes to millennium predictions, about the only thing one can say with any certainty is that most of them won't come true.

For centuries, prognosticators of every stripe -- religious, mystical, scientific -- have tried, and usually failed, to accurately predict what the year 2000 will bring.

Herbert G. Lawson, author of Here Comes Tomorrow! Living and Working in the Year 2000, predicted an end to the chore of washing dishes "since disposable dishes will be made from powdered plastic for each meal by a machine in the kitchen."

House cleaning should also be a thing of the past by now, according to a 1950 article in Popular Mechanics. "Because everything in her home is waterproof," the magazine predicted, "the housewife of 2000 can do her daily cleaning with a hose." Perhaps true for those unfortunate souls who were flooded out by Hurricane Floyd, but for the rest of us it's still a can of Comet and a stiff-bristled brush.

Rocket belts, flying cars, food pills and inflatable houses are just a few of the grand predictions for the year 2000 that have failed to materialize. Of course, the fact that groundhogs are often better at predicting the future than the so-called experts doesn't dissuade modern-day Nostradamuses from sharing with us their wrong- headed opinions and badly blurred visions of events yet to come.

Many of the most famous, or infamous, pronouncements that would have been better left unsaid were collected by authors Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky in their 1984 book, The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation. Here are a few:

* "What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?" -- The Quarterly Review, England (March, 1825)

Of course it has still not been proven that a Ford Pinto can travel faster than an overturned stagecoach, but that is another matter.

* "Men might as well project a voyage to the Moon as attempt to employ steam navigation against the stormy North Atlantic Ocean." -- Dr. Dionysus Lardner, professor of natural philosophy and astronomy, University College, London, 1838

Steam-driven moon rockets do sound unwieldy.

* "When the Paris Exhibition closes, electric light will close with it and no more be heard of." -- Erasmus Wilson, professor at Oxford University, 1878

* "Well-informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value." -- editorial in the Boston Post, 1865

* "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." -- Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, circa 1895

Another good reason not to be in an airplane Jan. 1, 2000.

* "There is not the slightest indication that (nuclear energy) will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." -- Albert Einstein, 1932

Which would mean shipping it through the mail in a box marked "fragile."

* "Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 19,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may only have 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons." -- Popular Mechanics, March 1949

That would definitely ruin your trouser-crease if you were a laptop user.

* "There is no need for any individual to have a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, president of Digital Equipment, 1977

There's no need for microwave popcorn, either, but we still buy it. This might also explain why Digital failed miserably in its many attempts to break into the personal computer market.

* "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

Watson also reportedly had the world's largest collection of 8- track tapes.

David Grimes writes a humor column for the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald- Tribune, a part of the New York Times Regional Newspaper Group.

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