What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches? - The Quarterly Review, England (March 1825)
This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a practical form of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us. What use could this company make of an electrical toy? - Western Union (1878)
Radio has no future. - Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist (~1897)
Space travel is utter bilge. - Dr. Richard van der Reit Wooley, Astronomer Royal, space advisor to the British government, 1956. (Sputnik orbited the earth the following year.)
A laboratory curiosity, which may or may not ever amount to anything. - Instructor at General Electric on the transistor (1956)
Said the Technocrat, to the Plutocrat, To the Autocrat, and the Democrat, Let's all go eat at the Automat. - Mood poem of the Great Depression, New York Evening Sun (1933)