This book tells the stories behind scores of predictions made over the past 140 years. Each prediction, its date, and the name of the predictor is followed by a short essay focusing not only on whether or not it came true, but how it did or why it did not. There are startling predictive successes - like airplanes, television, trips to the moon, and the atomic bomb that came decades before their actuality. Apollo 9 splashed down in the Pacific only two miles from a spot picked out by Jules Verne a century earlier; H. G. Wells coined the term "atomic bomb" in 1913; Edward Bellamy wrote of credit cards in 1888. Predicting the future is a perilous business. While a prediction that proves correct may considerably enhance your fame, your reputation can be forever clouded by a bad enough mistake. There are also those, several of whom you will meet in this book, who are best remembered for having got it dreadfully wrong - indeed some poor souls are remembered only for that reason. Some of the worst flubs have come from nay-sayers - that nobody would be interested in talking pictures or want to own a personal computer, for example. But right or wrong, the history of predictions tells us where we've been, how we got to where we are, and where we may go yet.
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About the Author
John Malone
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
A fascinating account of the power of the imagination to not only predict but also create the future. An elegant writer and judicious chooser of facts, Malone takes a level-headed approach to the people he writes about, deflating and praising as appropriate. PREDICTING THE FUTURE provides a useful context for evaluating all the technological changes coming at us today.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2.7 out of 5 stars
3 reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
a pitifully researched book
22 July 1999
By Norman
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a pitifully researched book. Lazy. It sells disinformation.
Problem: Malone devotes a "chapter" (or whatever they were) to the supposed shortsighted quote attributed to Charles Duell, the Commissioner of the U.S. Office of Patents in 1899. We've all heard it: "Everything that can be invented, has been invented." Unfortunately, this is a completely bogus myth (though popular), and Duell never said anything of the sort, as even the slightest research into his life would have quickly revealed. Myth passed as truth. Lazy. Disinformation.
Problem: Malone attributes the conception of the fax machine to Jules Verne in his novel Paris in the 2oth century. He offers as evidence a passage from Verne's book: "photographic telegraphy, invented in the last century by ... Giovanni Caselli of Florence, permitted transmission of the facsimile form of any writing or illustration...". Amazingly, Malone mistook Professor Caselli for a Verne-invented fictional character. In fact, a real Caselli DID invent a working fax, a model which sent pictures from Lyon to Paris from 1865-70, starting before the publication of Verne's book. Patents for faxes go back to 1843. Lazy. Disinformation.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
A bathroom book
23 Jun 1999
By A Customer
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a book of interesting little stories about how smart people have tried to predict the future but failed. However, the lack of organization means that you can't really use it for a reference, and sooner or later you tire of reading the stories and try to think about the issue a little more systematically.
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Even the smartest didn't always get it right
23 Sep 1997
By A Customer
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
A fascinating account of the power of the imagination to not only predict but also create the future. An elegant writer and judicious chooser of facts, Malone takes a level-headed approach to the people he writes about, deflating and praising as appropriate. PREDICTING THE FUTURE provides a useful context for evaluating all the technological changes coming at us today
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2.7 out of 5 stars
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