Even the smartest experts have a hard time predicting the future of technology. Consider the example of Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet who, in 1995, boldly forecast that the internet would experience a catastrophic collapse — or a “gigalapse” — the following year.

But, when he got it wrong, Metcalfe literally ate his own words. To chants of “Eat, baby, eat!” at a tech industry event, Metcalfe ripped up a copy of his future-gazing InfoWorld column, fed it into a blender, and consumed the resultant pulp.

Metcalfe’s unhappy experience — accepted with good grace and humility — is one of dozens of examples of erroneous predictions contained in the illuminating online resource that is the Pessimists Archive. Spanning the invention of the camera, electricity, aeroplanes, television and the computer, the archive records the many fanciful ways in which successive generations of technological experts have been dead wrong.