Here is a list of 25 of the world’s worst predictions. Everybody is aware of some but certainly not all. In hindsight it is absurd that these predictions could have been made but that is the problem with predictions, the mind-shift required to incorporate the change is beyond most people’s ability. This inability pervades even the highly intelligent including Einstein.
Being a devotee of science and technology, I avidly read magazines such as Popular Science, the New Scientist and Scientific America during the 1970s. Perennially on the long term discoveries lists of 10 years or more were fibre optics together with fusion power. Whereas 50 years later fusion power is still on the long range list, overnight in the late 1970s, fibre optics migrated in one year from the long term to the already discovered list.