4 ms·

Lord Kelvin should probably have kept his mouth shut.

• ajross 18y ago
  Almost all of this stuff is taken out of context. Almost all of them are statements about immediate practicality, not predictions of the future. When Kelvin said that, there wasn't even a hint of an engine that could actually power an airplane. He was basically right: in the middle of the 19th century, the Wright brothers would have failed to produce an airplane. Likewise the Western Union quote about the telephone. The devices demonstrated in 1878 really were primitive, and competed very poorly with telegrams for rapid communication. But yeah, it's all funny.
  • evgen 18y ago
    Agreed. When they were doing the re-creation of the Wright Flyer for its anniversary flight recently I was quite taken by just how primitive the engine was and how much mass there was just to get a few HP. The advancement in engine power to weight ratios over the next forty years is absolutely amazing if you consider how slowly things have moved for the previous hundred years.
• aswanson 18y ago
  Though in some cases he may have been in error, I disagree: http://zapatopi.net/kelvin/quotes/ http://zapatopi.net/kelvin/quotes/