Quotably Wrong

• "I would not wish to be Prime Minister, dear." —Margaret Thatcher in 1973
• "That rainbow song's no good. Take it out." —MGM memo after first showing of The Wizard Of Oz
• "You'd better learn secretarial skills or else get married." —Modelling agency, rejecting Marilyn Monroe in 1944
• "Radio has no future." "X-rays are clearly a hoax." "The aeroplane is scientifically impossible." —Royal Society president Lord [William Thomas] Kelvin, 1897-9
• "You ought to go back to driving a truck." —Concert manager, firing Elvis Presley in 1954
• "Forget it. No Civil War picture ever made a nickel." —MGM executive, advising against investing in Gone With The Wind
• "Can't act. Can't sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little." —A film company's verdict on Fred Astaire's 1928 screen test
• "Very interesting, Whittle, my boy, but it will never work." —Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at Cambridge, shown Frank Whittle's plan for the jet engine
• "The Beatles? They're on the wane." —The Duke of Edinburgh in Canada, 1965. They went on to produce a string of No 1s
• "The atom bomb will never go off — and I speak as an expert in explosives." —U.S. Admiral William Leahy in 1945
• "All saved from Titanic after collision." —New York Evening Sun, April 15 1912
• "Brain work will cause women to go bald." —Berlin professor, 1914
• "Television won't matter in your lifetime or mine." —Radio Times editor Rex Lambert, 1936
• "Everything that can be invented has been invented." —director of the U.S. Patent Office, 1899
• "And for the tourist who really wants to get away from it all, safaris in Vietnam." —Newsweek magazine, predicting popular holidays for the late 1960s.