“Prediction is very hard, especially when it’s
about the future”
Yogi Berra
Lord Kelvin, in a famous lame prediction in 1895, announced that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” He was also the unseer who said ”radio has no future.” But he was not alone in failing to see the inevitable. Einstein said in 1932 “there is not the slightest indication that [nuclear] energy will ever be obtainable.” And noted Yale economist Irving Fisher once intoned “stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
The list goes on and on.
Thomas Watson, founder of IBM, in 1943: “I think there is a world market for about five computers.” Politics fading away, nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners, the auto as a mere fad, and then the classic advice to Elvis Presley from the manager of the Grand Ole Opry in 1954: “you ain’t goin’ nowhere son – you ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.”
Examples of wayward predictions run throughout the tale of the made world. How the airplane would usher in an age of planetary consciousness, how dynamite would end war, how we would all be wearing jetpacks by the 1960s.
Despite some informed guesses by science fiction writers (Jules Verne envisioned the fax machine in an 1863 novel), most futurecasting is so far off the mark that the future tends to look terribly passe in retrospect. The clunky robots of the fifties look as dumb to us as our shiny cyborgs will no doubt seem to our kid’s kids. From the steering wheel on Flash Gordon’s rocket ship to the gas lamps on Jules Verne's mooncraft, we are always limited by the horizons of our current technology.
Take the case of the phonograph as a tiny example.
Everyone knows that Thomas Edison invented it and ushered in the age of recorded sound. And paved the way for wax recordings and gramophones and LPs and Victrolas and stereos and CDs and tapes and Napster and the transformation of audio from a lowly prefix into a billion dollar industry. You can probably visualize that first recording device in all its Victorian elegance with its hand-cranked cylinder turning a sheet of tinfoil under a needle, and that small cone collecting Edison’s sound waves as he shouted “Mary had a little lamb” into it. Everybody knows that story.
There is a fairly straight line of progress from Edison’s familiar gizmo to the audiophonic world we live in today. Or so it seems because the phonograph is famous; one of those devices that had to be. Who could not have predicted that sooner or later we would be able to reproduce the human voice and that this would lead to generations of improvements and, eventually, to my iPod with its 2,000 songs.
But then, what to make of the phonautograph?
Never heard of it?
The phonautograph was the direct predecessor to Edison’s machine, but no one remembers it. Nor the name of Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville for whom the phonautograph was the culmination of a life’s work. Scott was trying to create a mechanical or automatic stenographer that would, in his words, “...permit the poet, the dramatist, the novelist, to fix at will his inspirations...” The machine that he constructed in 1857 to accomplish this looked amazingly similar to Edison’s phonograph 20 years later. It had virtually the same construction...a sound-gathering horn, vibrating membrane, stylus, and a turning cylinder on which the motion of the moving stylus could be recorded.
The main difference between the two was that the entire purpose of Scott’s device was to make a visual record of the sound, a graph of the sound waves. The moving stylus recorded a pattern that would allow scientists to see sound. In other words, and unlike Edison, Scott was trying to visualize sound waves not reproduce them.
He did not get very far with his machine; it failed to capture the imagination of investors. But there is little doubt that Edison knew of the earlier device and was perhaps even influenced by it. Although his patents had expired by the time of Edison’s invention, Scott continued to defend his machine in public.
And here is where predicting the future becomes such a problem.
Scott and many others at the time believed without question that the phonautograph was the more important invention. They thought of Scott’s device as a true scientific instrument and Edison’s machine as just a toy. Why? Because Edison’s device merely reproduced sound…it was not a sound-writer. And to Scott and his scientific supporters it was the printed transcription of sounds, not their mechanical reproduction, that would benefit the world.
This is difficult for us to understand from our vantage point at the far end of the line. But Scott was immersed in the 19th century fascination with recording the truths of nature. He believed that the benefits of new technology would come from understanding the world directly via instruments, without the intervention of human sense and all its limitations. The point of all such devices was to get at reality, to expand the rational enterprise. Mere reproduction was nothing more than a diversion for children. But making an accurate scientific record, that was the goal of his and a whole host of other measuring inventions of the day.
Scott was right about the future value of scientific instruments to measure aspects of reality and tell us how the world works. Modern medicine alone proves his case.
But boy was he wrong about the phonograph. And so were a lot of scientists. So was Edison himself, ironically, who was convinced that the importance of his own machine was in reproducing speech not music. After all, he reasoned, why on earth would anyone want to hear sounds that were not produced by live musicians?
The answer of course is obvious and it is the same reason that all futurecasting ultimately fails.
It is because tomorrow had not been invented yet.
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