TARRANT COUNTY PHYSICIAN (11)
January/February 2021
- Robert Ferry, executive of the U.S. Institute of
Boiler and Radiator Manufacturers, 1955. (Actually,
the jury is still out on this one. The idea of small nuclear
reactors may be on the way to becoming a big business—
see the NuScale Power website). “
“ Space travel is bunk. - Sir Harold Spencer Jones,
Astronomer Royal of the UK,
1957 (two weeks later Sputnik
orbited the Earth).
-
Ernest Rutherford, 1933, after splitting
the atom for the first time in 1919. “
811 W. Interstate 20, Suite 134, Arlington, TX 76017
“ We stand on the threshold of rocket mail. - U.S. Postmaster General
Arthur Summerfield, in 1959.
The basic questions of design, material and shielding,
in combining a nuclear reactor with a home boiler
and cooling unit, no longer are problems . . . The
system would heat and cool a home, provide unlimited
household hot water, and melt the snow from sidewalks
and driveways. All that could be done for six years on a
single charge of fissionable material costing about $300.
“ Space travel is utter bilge. - Richard Van Der Riet Woolley,
upon assuming the post of Astronomer
Royal in 1956.
“ . . . Too far-fetched to be considered. - Editor of Scientific American,
in a letter to Robert Goddard about
Goddard’s idea of a rocket-accelerated
airplane bomb, in 1940 (German V2
missiles came down on London three
years later).
impossible to transmit the human
voice over wires.
- News item in a New York newspaper, 1868. “
The energy produced by the breaking down of the
atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who
expects a source of power from the transformation
of these atoms is talking moonshine.
A man has been arrested in New
York for attempting to extort funds
from ignorant and superstitious
people by exhibiting a device which
he says will convey the human
voice any distance over metallic
wires so that it will be heard by the
listener at the other end. He calls
this instrument a telephone. Wellinformed
people know that it is