Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

THE DENIAL OF CHANGE In 1865 a newspaper editor told his readers that "Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that, were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value." Barely a decade later, the telephone erupted from Mr. Bell's laboratory and changed the world. On the very day that the Wright brothers took wing, newspapers refused to report the event because their sober, solid, feet-on-the-ground editors simply could not bring themselves to believe it had happened. After all, a famous American astronomer, Simon Newcomb, had not long before assured the world that "No possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances." Not long after this, another expert announced publicly that it was "nothing less than feeblemindedness to expect anything to come of the horseless carriage movement." Six years later the one-millionth Ford rolled off an assembly line. And then there was the great Rutherford, himself, the discoverer of the atom, who said in 1933 that the energy in the atom's nucleus would never be released. Nine years later: the first chain reaction.

Examples of the human mind denying change