What the Future will be Like

"Everything that can be invented has been invented"

Charles H. Duell
U.S. Office of Patents, 1899

"The trend of things seems all against any diminuation of what is called the servant difficulty to-day, and, as a consequence of that we may expect the Twentieth Century house, not only to be full of labour-saving appliances, dustless sweepers, self-making beds, neatly-mounted electric cooking things, and so on, but built with a much more earnest regard to convenience and cleanliness than our houses of to-day."

H. G. Wells
"The English House of the Future"
Strand Magazine, 1903

"Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction"

Pierre Pachet
Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872

"The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon"

Sir John Eric Ericksen
Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria, 1873

Mining for gold on the Moon.

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."

Western Union internal memo, 1876

[Return to Main Confluence Page]