DURING the composer's life, some bold predictions were made about the future, some were more wrong than others.

1859: Drillers hired by Edwin L Drake to share his project looking for oil replied: "You mean drill into the ground to try to find oil? You are crazy."

1872: Pierre Pachet the professor of physiology at Toulouse declared: "Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous."

1876: The managers at Western Union exchanged an internal memo, saying: "This telephone has too many short comings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."

1895: Lord Kelvin, president of the Royal Society, announced: "Heavier than air flying machines are impossible." Meanwhile Marechal Ferdinand Foch, professor of strategy at Ecole Superieure de Guerre, asserted that, "aeroplanes are interesting toys but of no military value".

1920s: Fund-raising for investment in radio was met with scepticism as: "the wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value."

1923: Nobel Physics Laureate Robert Millikan said: "There is no likelihood man can tap the power of the atom."