“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
— Irving Fisher
(Professor of Economics at Yale University), October 17, 1929
On Thursday, October 24, 1929, panic struck Wall Street: stock
values plummeted $6 billion before steadying in the late afternoon
trading, as a record 12,894,650 shares changed hands.
“The end of the decline of the Stock Market will . . . probably not be
long, only a few more days at the most.”
—Irving Fisher
(Professor of Economics at Yale University), quoted in The
Brooklyn Eagle,
November 14, 1929.
“FINANCIAL STORM DEFINITELY PASSED.”
—Bernard Baruch
(American financier, statesman, and presidential economic
advisor),
Cablegram to Winston Churchill, November 15, 1929
“[For] the immediate future, at least, the outlook is bright.
— Irving Fisher
(Professor of Economics at Yale University),
The Stock Market Crash – and After, 1930
“Gentlemen, you have come sixty days too late. The depression
is over.”
—Herbert Hoover,
responding to a delegation requesting a public works program to
help speed the recovery, June 1930
“This is the biggest fool thing we have ever done . . . The bomb will
never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.”
—Admiral William Daniel Leahy,
advising President Harry S. Truman on the impracticality of the U.S.
atomic bomb project, 1945
“[Atmospheric nuclear] tests do not seriously endanger either present
or future generations.”
—Dr. Edward Teller
(“Father of the Hydrogen Bomb”),
“Compelling Needs for Nuclear Tests,”
Life, February 10, 1958
“No rocket will reach the moon save by a miraculous discovery of an
explosive far more energetic than any known. And even if the requisite
fuel were produced, it would still have to be shown that the rocket
machine would operate at 459 degrees below zero – the temperature of
interplanetary space.”
—Nikola Tesla
(American scientist and developer of the rotating magnetic field),
November 1928
“[Man will never reach the moon] regardless of all future scientific
advances.”
—Dr. Lee DeForest
(inventor of the audion tube),
Quoted in The New York Times, February 25, 1957
“[Before man reaches the moon] you mail will be delivered within
hours from New York to California, to England, to India or to Australia
by guided missiles . . . We stand on the threshold of rocket mail.”
—Arthur E. Sumerfield
(U.S. Postmaster General), January 23, 1959)