It’ll never work

Get your old stodgy self over to this website and read a few of the new-fangled ideas that were just never going to get anywhere:

[W]hen the Paris Exhibition closes electric light will close with it and no more be heard of.
- Erasmus Wilson (1878) Professor at Oxford University

This `telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a practical form of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.
- Western Union internal memo, 1878

Radio has no future.
- Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), British mathematician and physicist, ca. 1897.

The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad.
- Advice from a president of the Michigan Savings Bank to Henry Ford’s lawyer Horace Rackham. Rackham ignored the advice and invested $5000 in Ford stock, selling it later for $12.5 million.

Etc.