Top 10 Failed Predictions

It's the End of the World as We Know It

Lance Iversen / The San Fransisco Chronicle / Corbis

Harold Camping's prediction that the world will end Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, is not his first such prediction. In 1992, the evangelist published a book called 1994?, which proclaimed that sometime in mid-September 1994, Christ would return and the world would end. Camping based his calculations on numbers and dates found in the Bible and, at the time, said he was "99.9% certain" that his math was correct. But the world did not end in 1994. Nor did it end on March 31, 1995 — another date Camping provided when September 1994 passed without incident. Or earlier this year on May 21, when Camping spurred a nationwide marketing campaign to warn people that the world was ending. "I'm like the boy who cried wolf again and again, and the wolf didn't come," Camping told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1995. "This doesn't bother me in the slightest."

The Earth Is Flat

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Earth is seen from space in this recent photo composite image from NASA made over a span of several months and from different angles.

As far as failed predictions go, this one may be the original. Everyone knows the world is round, right? Not so. Homer thought it was flat. Ancient Buddhist cosmology agreed that earth was like a horizontal disk. Hebrew Scriptures suggested it might resemble a dome. Some in ancient China claimed it to be a square. And when Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, many Europeans thought he might reach its edge. Some scholars suggest that a round-earth theory had more early support than one might think. Echoes of a round-earth cosmology can be heard in Plato, and 6th century B.C. Greek philosopher Pythagoras (yep, same a² + b² = c² guy) is said to have agreed. Around the time of Christ, an Asian belief held that the earth was like the yolk in an egg, and Muslim scholars supported a round earth by the 9th century. The Western world joined the round-earth campaign a little late, when Magellan's 1519 global voyage seemed to confirm the round hypothesis. Yet, as is the case with many strange predictions, a handful of believers like the Flat Earth Society still hold fast to their convictions. The rest of us would say however, they are, um, flat-out wrong.

Prosperity Will Never End

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Careers can rise and fall on just one fateful statement, as mathematical economist Irving Fisher learned in 1929. "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau," he confidently predicted. Three days later, the stock market plunged into a historic collapse, which led to mass unemployment, the Great Depression and a decade of gloom. Fisher believed that the market was inherently rational and efficient; in the months following the crash, he continued to assure investors and insisted that a recovery was just around the corner. Though the economy finally improved after World War II, Fisher's short-lived bubble was, unfortunately, far from the last the U.S. would experience.

Technology? What's That?

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With an influx of new tablets, smart phones, computers and other devices constantly hitting the market, it's almost impossible to argue that the future of technology is anything but bright. But it didn't always seem that way. In the past, as the world struggled to understand the meteoric rise in technological innovation, even those who worked in the industry were skeptical of its staying power. In 1977, Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corp., stated, "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Yet in 2009, it was reported that approximately 80% of households in the U.S. had at least one computer. Darryl Zanuck, a movie producer at 20th Century Fox, said in 1946 that television wouldn't last because "people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." Now the demand for TV is so high that there are literally thousands of channels available for viewers' daily consumption. As for the Internet, that was also doomed to fail, according to astronomer Clifford Stoll. In a 1995 Newsweek column, Stoll said that "no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works." But, of course, the Internet is unquestionably one of the greatest inventions in modern history. There have even been more recent doubts about the iPhone. In 2007, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, said, "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance." Well, we all know how that turned out. This just goes to show that what's not considered possible today may be the wave of the future. Time travel, anyone?

Four-Piece Groups with Guitars Are Finished

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"The Beatles have no future in show business," a Decca Records executive told the band's manager, Brian Epstein, in 1962. "We don't like your boys' sound. Groups are out; four-piece groups with guitars, particularly, are finished." It's almost inconceivable how wrong-headed this statement was, considering Britain and the U.S. were about to usher in the era of the modern rock-'n'-roll band (many of them four-piece guitar groups) via the greatest foursome of them all. But in 1962, the Beatles were still just another band playing clubs in Europe and trying to make it big. John Lennon and Paul McCartney hadn't even started writing many songs yet (only three songs played at the Decca audition were originals). With the Fab Four reportedly not too fab in their audition, Decca went with another band trying out at the same time, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. Yeah, we've never listened to them either.

Y2K

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It was the day that was supposed to finally prove what Luddites and other tech haters had been saying for so long: computers — not sin or religious prophecy come true — will bring us down. For months before the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, analysts speculated that entire computer networks would crash, causing widespread dysfunction for a global population that had become irreversibly dependent on computers to hold, disseminate and analyze its most vital pieces of information. The problem was that many computers had been programmed to record dates using only the last two digits of every year, meaning that the year 2000 would register as the year 1900, totally screwing with the collective computerized mind. But it just wasn't so. Aside from a few scattered power failures in various countries, problems in data-transmission systems at some of Japan's nuclear plants (which did not affect their safety) and a temporary interruption in receipt of data from the U.S.'s network of intelligence satellites, the new year arrived with nothing more than the expected hangover.

The Titanic Is Unsinkable

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If the Titanic had made a safe voyage as was intended, it would have been just another grandiose vessel with lofty expectations. Prior to the voyage, the ship's captain, Edward J. Smith, said, "I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that." Phillip Franklin, vice president of the White Star Line, which had produced the ship, added, "There is no danger that Titanic will sink." Unfortunately, it did not live up to those predictions. The ship sailed, hit an iceberg, and the rest is history. But, hey, at least we got a good movie out of it.

Online Shopping Will Flop

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Today it's difficult to imagine a world without online shopping, where people placed remote orders through telephones and went to actual stores to find what they were looking for. But in 1966, before the Internet even existed, TIME published an essay called "The Futurists," which imagined what the world would be like in the year 2000. Besides guessing the social, physical and technological changes in the world, TIME pontificated that remote shopping, while possible, would never become popular because "women like to get out of the house, like to handle the merchandise, like to be able to change their minds." That may be true, but it doesn't stop women — and men — from giving e-commerce a boost every year. In fact, online shopping seems to be trending upward, with approximately $38 billion in U.S. retail sales reported in the first quarter of 2011 alone — up 12% from the previous year. We admit, we were wrong.

Heart and Brain Surgery — Never Gonna Happen

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The average human life span is significantly longer now than it was in the 19th century, and we have modern practices like heart and brain surgery partially to thank for that. But there used to be doubt that those surgeries could ever happen. Medical attitudes of that time reveal that some were not interested in making any surgical advances. "The abdomen, the chest and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon," announced Sir John Eric Erichsen, a British doctor appointed Surgeon Extraordinary to Queen Victoria, in 1873. In 1884, though, the first modern brain surgery was performed when British surgeon Rickman Godlee successfully removed a brain tumor. Eleven years after that, Norwegian surgeon Axel Cappelen performed the first heart surgery at Rikshospitalet in Oslo. Erichsen was wrong, but he wasn't in doubt.

The End of History Is Nigh

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Harvard academic Francis Fukuyama's 1989 article inNational Interest spawned his most famous work, published three years later. As Soviet communism collapsed and movements for freedom and democracy in Eastern Europe captured the world's imagination, Fukuyama suggested that the time was not far off when every nation-state would become a liberal democracy. Invoking the 19th century philosopher Hegel, who thought of history as a kind of evolutionary process, Fukuyama imagined a natural "teleological" end whereby the pinnacle of human development would be in societies based on democracy and capitalism. In an era of optimism, The End of History and the Last Man won Fukuyama near instant celebrity and influenced a whole swath of prominent commentators and advocates of globalization, like "earth is flat" proponent Thomas Friedman. But history, as Fukuyama surely accepts, has not ended. The world looks no closer to being one large European Union — and with the success of decidedly undemocratic China and the rise of reactionary, extremist right-wing movements throughout the West, some argue that it's Fukuyama's liberal democracy whose future lies in shadow.