When Pigs Fly...

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."
--Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 1872
may be the earliest reference to pigs flying in literature...

"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

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899

"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value."
Marechal Ferdinand Foch, WWI French General, Stopped the Germans at the Second Battle of Marne 1918, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre



"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
General Manager of RCA, David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s

"Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."
1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work

"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."
Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929

"Man shall never reach the moon, for such a quantity of gunpowder would be needed as to gravely injure the crew."
Children's Encyclopaedia, 1926

"Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances."
Dr. Lee De Forest, inventor of the vacuum tube, father of television and owner of over 300 patents



"I think there's a world market for about five computers."
Thomas J. Watson, Chairman of the Board, IBM

"The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives."
Admiral William Leahy, US Atomic Bomb Project

"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."
Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962

"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'"
Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer



"You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across all of your muscles? It can't be done. It's just a fact of life. You just have to accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable condition of weight training."
Response to Arthur Jones, who solved the "unsolvable" problem by inventing Nautilus

"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this."
Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M "Post-It" Notepads

"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a "C," the idea must be feasible."
A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. Smith went on to found Federal Express Corporation

"A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make."
Response to Debbi Fields' idea of starting Mrs. Fields' Cookies



And what may be the ultimate misjudgement:

"I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper."
Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in "Gone With The Wind"