History of demeaning successful technologies continues with Brady

In 1878, Edison’s light bulb was deemed unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men. The engineer in chief of the British Post Office said the “sub-division of the electric light is an absolute ignis fatuus,” a fairy tale.

Alexander Graham Bell is reported to have offered to sell his telephone patent to Western Union in 1886. Western Union declined, citing the obvious limitations of his device.

According to entrepreneur. com, physicians of the 1890s warned that the rising motion of an elevator could trigger “brain fever,” plus nausea and faintness.

In 1911, Ferdinand Foch, a French general and Allied commander during World War I, said, “Airplanes are interesting scientific toys, but they are of no military value.”

In 1920, the New York Times wrote that a rocket couldn’t possibly work in space.

In 1926, the year of the first demonstration of a working television, inventor and electronics pioneer Lee de Forest said the device would be a commercial and financial impossibility.

In 1995, a Newsweek article titled “The Internet? Bah!” slammed the innovation and predicted it would crash and burn.

The 1996 book “Women and Computers” claimed women were afflicted with what it called computerphobia, a panoply of conditions that reflected a fear of touching or damaging the computer and an aversion to discussing or reading about it.

In 1980, a consultant told AT&T that the mobile phone would be a strictly niche device with just 900,000 users in the U.S. by 2000. The total number of users that year hit 108 million.

To these examples of imprudent and myopic views, I add Mr. Carl Brady’s continual, ad nauseam diatribes in this forum, condemning and demeaning the renewable energies of our future. They are our future if we are to have one. Brady somehow ignores the documented damage and death caused by fossil fuels as if they never existed.