I just picked up a wonderful book for inspiration, and I strongly recommend it to you. It’s called “The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation,” by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky. It’s not a new book, but it is terrific. Among the many quotes that caught my eye deal with disruptive technologies. Here’s a taste:

The Telegraph: “[I am] not satisfied… that under any rate of postage that could be adopted its revenues could be made equal to its expenditures. – U.S. Postmaster General rejecting an offer by Samuel Morse to sell the rights to his telegraph to the U.S. Government for $100,000 c. 1845.

Cinema: “My invention… can be exploited for a certain time as a scientific curiosity, but apart from that it has no commercial value whatsoever.” -Auguste Lumiere (Co-inventor of the motion picture camera) 1895.

The Telephone:

“Well-informed people know that 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 on the arrest of Joshua Coopersmith who had been arrested for fraud for trying to raise money for his work on a telephone.

“That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?” – President Rutherford B. Hayes after participating in a phone conversation demonstration.

Radio: (The U.S. District Attorney prosecuting the inventor of the Audion vacuum tube, Lee Deforest, for fraud in 1913): “DeForest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit the human voice over the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public… has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company.”

Television:

Lee DeForest (remember – the guy who was prosecuted for raising money for his own work on radio tubes) said of television in 1926: “I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.
“People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” – Darryl F. Zanuck (head of 20th Century Fox Studios), c.1946.

The Computer: “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.” – Ken Olson, president of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977.

(Need I point out that he was running a computer company?)
Special Credit to Thomas Edison, for dismissing lots of inventions, including the phonograph – his own.

• “The talking motion picture will not supplant the regular silent motion picture.” (1913)
• “The radio craze… will die out in time.” (1922)
• “The phonograph is not of any commercial value.” (1880)

Now, you can always find people with opinions that turn out to be wrong. But note how many of these come from pioneers themselves. Edison and the Lumieres developed inventions and didn’t immediately see the value. DeForest was prosecuted while working on his radio tube, but saw the prospect of TV as an impossible waste of time. The president of DEC couldn’t imagine a reason for us to have computers. And the U.S. Post Office was practically handed its own Western Union, only to turn it down because it didn’t see Morse Code as a profitable way to send messages. These are the classic fears of disruption Terry I and write about frequently.

What’s important to learn from this terrific book is that there will be plenty of people who will tell you something can’t be done. There will be those who don’t even recognize the value of what they have. Learn from history (and have some fun with it). Stand by your work and your vision. Besides, who wants to be remembered for saying a bunch of things won’t work?

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