The term “science” derives from the Latin, scientia, which means “knowledge.”

We almost all of us attribute the invention of the telephone to Alexander Graham Bell. But it was not welcomed by all scientists. The U.S. Post Office turned him down, and also Western Union, when he tried to convince them to use it. The Chief Engineer of the the British Post office was Sir William Preece a distinguished English scientist and Fellow of the Royal Society. He turned Bell down saying "England has plenty of small boys to run messages". But he later proved that he was even denser than that, when hearing of Edison's work on the light bulb, he commented, "A completely idiotic idea".

Scientists and doctors in the 1920s thought tobacco use was helpful to the body in promoting digestion and calmness. Many magazines of the era carried endorsements by doctors for cigarettes.

Thalidomide is a drug that was promoted and first marketed by a German soap company in 1954 to fight morning sickness. Instead it created birth defects and a scandal.

Scientists in Scotland just finished conducting a five year test on sheep brain tissue but unfortunately they turned out to be the brain tissue from cows.

When the Hubble Space Telescope was launched it didn't work properly. The mirror was not ground correctly. Apparently it was never tested properly. The scope had to be repaired in space.

In 1992 NASA launched a Mars Climate Orbiter. Officials were guiding the probe using the metric system. Too bad it had been designed by Lockheed-Martin to use the English pounds system. Not surprisingly it plunged into the planet and was destroyed. Then there was the Mars Polar Lander in the same year. It was never head from again and it is now believed that a line of computer code was left out of its program.

Some day the International Space Station may be listed as a blunder since it eats up almost all of NASA's budget when you include shuttle flights and prevents us from being able to budget manned space exploration.

Lord Kelvin when hearing of Marconi's experiments with radio stated that radio has no future.

Upon seeing a television camera system for the first time the British Royal Society scoffed at it.

When the scanning-tunneling microscope was invented in 1982, its inventors were laughed at, at every demonstration by their peers. This changed in 1986 when they won the Nobel Prize.

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, who lived from 1818 to 1865, in Hungry, was the first physician to use antiseptic techniques for baby deliveries. He discovered that childbed fever killed about 12 mothers in every thousand because doctors would spread it by not washing their hands. He was almost laughed out of the profession and became mentally ill and died a ruined man. He was later proven correct by Joseph Lister who developed modern antiseptic techniques.

Some scientists and engineers refused to go to the Wrigtht Brothers demonstrations because they stated that flying heavier than air machines was impossible. A biography was written Fred C. Kelly, year later. He said he wrote it as an apology for calling the brothers frauds.

Thousands of convictions have been called into question when it was found that many of the DNA samples used during testing were contaminated and sloppy lab work had been used by many police labs across the country.

It is said that thousands of deaths result from mistakes in hospitals.