What do we mean when we say someone has vision? In part we mean the person is sufficiently aware of current events to identify future trends. Stories of those who cornered the market in raw widgets just two years before raw widgets became more valuable than diamonds are the stuff of which business legends are made.
For pastors, the story takes a little different turn. The pastoral visionary is the one who established a fledgling church on the Yucca Salt Flats just one year before a colony of six thousand multimillionaires decided the only place to build their new homes was the Yucca Salt Flats.
But one rarely hears about those whose vision, though emphatically stated, turns out to be less than 20/20. Several years ago, Paul Dickson, author of The Future File, noted in Saturday Review several of these avisionaries and the comments that made them infamous.
Anesthesia
The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it today. Knife and pain are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient. To this compulsory combination we shall have to adjust ourselves.
-Dr. Alfred Velpeau, 1839
The Atomic Bomb
That 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 D. Leahy to President Truman, 1945
Aviation
The demonstration 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 through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.
-Simon Newcomb, astronomer, 1903
Insanity
We are gradually approaching, with the decadence of youth, a near proximity to a nation of madmen. By comparing the lunacy statistics of 1809 with those of 1909, an insane world is looked forward to by me with a certainty in the not far distant future.
-Dr. Forbes Winslow, 1910
Invention
The advancement of the arts from year to year taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when further improvement must end.
-Henry L. Ellsworth, U.S. Commissioner of Patents, 1844
Population
The population of the earth decreases every day, and, if this continues, in another ten centuries the earth will be nothing but a desert.
-Montesquieu, 1743
War and Violence
To kill a man will be considered as disgusting as we in this day consider it disgusting to eat one.
-Andrew Carnegie, 1900
The West
I have never heard of anything, and I cannot conceive of anything more ridiculous, more absurd, and more affrontive to all sober judgment than the cry that we are profiting by the acquisition of New Mexico and California. I hold that they are not worth a dollar!
-Daniel Webster, Senate speech, 1848
World Collapse
My figures coincide in fixing 1950 as the year when the world must go to smash.
-Henry Adams, 1903
Copyright © 1984 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
