10 World-Changing Inventions People Thought Were Useless

8. Online Shopping

"Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop – because women like to get out of the house, like to handle merchandise, like to be able to change their minds."TIME Magazine, 1966.

Granted, TIME weren't talking about online shopping at the time (as there was no line to be on), but they did dramatically underestimate the people's desire to do as little as possible as often as they can, and this extends to getting someone else to do the legwork for you in your shopping.

Not only did they miss the mark with the potential success of online shopping, with online retail sales predicted to break $370 billion in 2017, but also pretty much all other aspects of their assertions.

Nearly 50 percent of Millennials, for example, report browsing online for stuff they have no intention of buying, proving that remote shopping did not, in fact, kill the joy of window shopping. Research also suggests that gender spending is about equal, putting the kibosh on the sweeping generalisations about women and shopping they snuck in there.