On Asphyxiation From Trains and Other Inaccurate Predictions

The incorrect predictions of yesterday have become an entire genre of listicle. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of them online—“The 7 Worst Tech Predictions of All Time,” according to PC Magazine, “15 Worst Tech Predictions of All Time” at Forbes, and “13 Future Predictions That Were So Wrong People Would Probably Regret Saying Them” at Bored Panda, to name just a few. These lists are often hilarious, full of prognostications that to our modern eye seem completely absurd. 

Here are a few classics of the genre: “Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia,” said the Irish writer Dionysius Lardner in 1830. “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,” said the head of IBM in 1943. And “What use could this company make of an electrical toy?” said the head of Western Union about the telephone in 1876. Wrong, wrong, and wrong again. 

There’s just one problem: None of those three quotes were ever uttered. In fact, a whole lot of the quotes that litter these popular listicles are either completely fabricated or taken out of context. And the glee with which we invent and soak in failed past predictions reveals a lot about how we think about, and perhaps miss, the real perils lurking on the road ahead. 

But first, let us clear the names of a few maligned souls who are endlessly misquoted as fools. 

The first time that quote about rail travel suffocating riders appears in the written record is in 1980—and Lardner, the supposed speaker, died in 1859. Lardner did get other things wrong about trains, but they’re far less interesting: He argued with a man named Isambard Kingdom Brunel about the designs for train routes and was often wrong, but his assertions had to do with calculating friction and other things that aren’t nearly sexy enough to put on a listicle. 

In fact, in 1830, when Lardner allegedly feared that trains might take our collective breaths away, the locomotives in question went about 30 miles per hour. A horse, at a gallop, goes about the same speed. (Speaking of historically dodgy stories, the idea that a train raced a horse in 1830 seems to be a myth). What he might have actually worried about was asphyxiation within a tunnel—something that actually did happen in 1861, when two men in a tunnel in Blisworth, England, died from the fumes of a steamboat engine. 

(This is not to say one can’t find funny and inaccurate predictions about the impact of a vehicle’s speed on the human body. In 1904, The New York Times published a story wondering if human brains were able to think at the speed of cars. “It remains to be proved how fast the brain is capable of traveling,” the author wrote. They worried that at speeds over 80 mph the car might be “running without the guidance of the brain, and the many disastrous results are not to be marveled at.”)

Or take the quote from the IBM head Thomas Watson about there being “a world market for maybe five computers.” Watson’s quote is so ubiquitous in lists of ridiculously bad future predictions that IBM even feels the need to clear this up in the FAQ section of a company history, explaining that the statement seems to come from something Watson said at the IBM stockholders meeting on April 28, 1953. Watson was telling stockholders about the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine, also sometimes known as the “Defense Calculator.” The 701 was a key step in IBM’s move from punch-card machines to digital processing, and the system’s main clientele was the government and giant science labs.