Skeptics who declared discoveries and inventions impossible
Almost every pioneer of science or technology was derided and
ignored by skeptics among their contemporaries at the time of their discoveries. It is
only later that they have become elevated to the status of heroes. Here
are some classic examples.
Discount Cigarettes
A completely idiotic idea
When
Alexander Graham Bell Invented the telephone he also made a remarkable leap of
imagination. He correctly foresaw how people would use his invention; that they would speak on the phone instead of writing a letter -- an early form
of
electronic mail.
Keen to sell his invention, Bell approached the Post Offices and commercial organisations responsible for
carrying mail. The U.S.
Post Office turned him down, as did Western Union. Then he approached the
British Post Office, whose Chief Engineer, Sir William Preece was one of
Britain's most distinguished scientists.
Preece was a Fellow of the Royal Society who had studied under the great Michael
Faraday himself. Preece examined Bell's invention, but he, too, rejected it on
the grounds that, "England has plenty of small
boys to run messages."
Preece later surpassed even this judgment.
When told that Thomas Edison was researching an incandescent electric lamp with
a high-resistance filament, Preece described it as "A completely idiotic
idea."
This rejection of the new by established science is not an isolated aberration.
It is the normal course of invention and discovery. Michael Faraday was
described as a charlatan by his contemporaries when he announced that he could
generate an electric current simply by moving a magnet in a coil of wire. Stung
by these accusations, Faraday wrote, "Nothing is too wonderful to be true
if it be consistent with the laws of nature."
Few examples are more striking than this one.
For
five years, from December 1903 to September 1908, two young bicycle mechanics
from Ohio repeatedly claimed to have built a heavier than air flying machine and
to have flown it successfully. But despite scores of public demonstrations,
affidavits from local dignitaries, and photographs of themselves flying, the
claims of Wilbur and Orville Wright were derided and dismissed as a hoax by Scientific
American, the New York Herald, the US Army and most American
scientists.
Experts were so convinced, on purely scientific grounds, that heavier than air
flight was impossible that they rejected the Wright brothers' claims without
troubling to examine the evidence. It was not until President Theodore Roosevelt
ordered public trials at Fort Myers in 1908 that the Wrights were able to prove
conclusively their claim and the Army and scientific press were compelled to
accept that their flying machine was a reality.
In one of those delightful quirks of fate that somehow haunt the history of
science, only weeks before the Wrights first flew at Kittyhawk, North Carolina,
the professor of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, Simon
Newcomb, had published an article in The Independent which showed
scientifically that powered human flight was 'utterly impossible.' Powered
flight, Newcomb believed, would require the discovery of some new unsuspected
force in nature. Only a year earlier, Rear-Admiral George Melville, chief
engineer of the US Navy, wrote in the North American Review that
attempting to fly was 'absurd'. It was armed with such eminent authorities as
these that Scientific American and the New York Herald scoffed at the Wrights as a pair of hoaxers.
In January 1906, more than two years after the Wrights had
first flown, Scientific American carried an article ridiculing the
'alleged' flights that the Wrights claimed to have made. Without a trace of
irony, the magazine gave as its main reason for not believing the Wrights the
fact that the American press had failed to write anything about them.
"If such sensational and tremendously important
experiments are being conducted in a not very remote part of the country, on
a subject in which almost everybody feels the most profound interest, is it
possible to believe that the enterprising American reporter, who, it is well
known, comes down the chimney when the door is locked in his face -- even if
he has to scale a fifteen-storey skyscraper to do so -- would not have
ascertained all about them and published them broadcast long ago?"
One way of explaining this odd reluctance to come to terms
with the new, even when there is plenty of concrete evidence available, is to
appeal to the natural human tendency not to believe things that sound impossible
unless we see them with our own eyes -- a healthy skepticism. But there is a
good deal more to this phenomenon than healthy skepticism.
In Alternative Science you can read about dozens of cases of inventors who
were ignored including:-
