d the telephone he also made a remarkable leap of imagination. He correctly foresaw how people would use his invention; that they would speak on the phone instead of writing a letter -- an early form of electronic mail. Keen to sell his invention, Bell approached the Post Offices and commercial organisations responsible for carrying mail. The U.S. Post Office turned him down, as did Western Union. Then he approached the British Post Office, whose Chief Engineer, Sir William Preece was one of Britain's most distinguished scientists. Preece was a Fellow of the Royal Society who had studied under the great Michael Faraday himself. Preece examined Bell's invention, but he, too, rejected it on the grounds that, "England has plenty of small boys to run messages." Preece later surpassed even this judgment. When told that Thomas Edison was researching an incandescent electric lamp with a high-resistance filament, Preece described it as "A completely idiotic idea." This rejection of the new by established science is not an isolated aberration. It is the normal course of invention and discovery. Michael Faraday was described as a charlatan by his contemporaries when he announced that he could generate an electric current simply by moving a magnet in a coil of wire. Stung by these accusations, Faraday wrote, "Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature."

Few examples are more striking than this one. For five years, from December 1903 to September 1908, two young bicycle mechanics from Ohio repeatedly claimed to have built a heavier than air flying machine and to have flown it successfully. But despite scores of public demonstrations, affidavits from local dignitaries, and photographs of themselves flying, the claims of Wilbur and Orville Wright were derided and dismissed as a hoax by Scientific American, the New York Herald, the US Army and most American scientists. Experts were so convinced, on purely scientific grounds, that heavier than air flight was impossible that they rejected the Wright brothers' claims without skeptics mocked the Wright brotherstroubling to examine the evidence. It was not until President Theodore Roosevelt ordered public trials at Fort Myers in 1908 that the Wrights were able to prove conclusively their claim and the Army and scientific press were compelled to accept that their flying machine was a reality. In one of those delightful quirks of fate that somehow haunt the history of science, only weeks before the Wrights first flew at Kittyhawk, North Carolina, the professor of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, Simon Newcomb, had published an article in The Independent which showed scientifically that powered human flight was 'utterly impossible.' Powered flight, Newcomb believed, would require the discovery of some new unsuspected force in nature. Only a year earlier, Rear-Admiral George Melville, chief engineer of the US Navy, wrote in the North American Review that attempting to fly was 'absurd'. It was armed with such eminent authorities as these that Scientific American and the New York Herald scoffed at the Wrights as a pair of hoaxers.

In January 1905, more than a year after the Wrights had first flown, Scientific American carried an article ridiculing the 'alleged' flights that the Wrights claimed to have made. Without a trace of irony, the magazine gave as its main reason for not believing the Wrights the fact that the American press had failed to write anything about them.

"If such sensational and tremendously important experiments are being conducted in a not very remote part of the country, on a subject in which almost everybody feels the most profound interest, is it possible to believe that the enterprising American reporter, who, it is well known, comes down the chimney when the door is locked in his face -- even if he has to scale a fifteen-storey skyscraper to do so -- would not have ascertained all about them and published them broadcast long ago?"

One way of explaining this odd reluctance to come to terms with the new, even when there is plenty of concrete evidence available, is to appeal to the natural human tendency not to believe things that sound impossible unless we see them with our own eyes -- a healthy skepticism. But there is a good deal more to this phenomenon than healthy skepticism. In Alternative Science you can read about dozens of cases of inventors who were ignored or even publicly ridiculed by their contemporaries, but whose inventions are today central to the modern world. You might imagine that such scientific intolerance was historical only and that in today's enlightened, educated world no scientist would behave in such an intolerant way.

Anyone who believes this, should take a close look at the next page, Forbidden Science.

The "Second Page"

Forbidden Science

Some areas of scientific research are so sensitive and so jealously guarded by conventional science that anyone who dares to dabble in them -- or even to debate them in public -- is likely to bring down condemnation from the scientific establishment on their head, and risk being derided, ridiculed or even called insane.

These fields of research are effectively forbidden to professional researchers and the media, no-go areas whose only inhabitants are 'crackpots' and fools. Forbidden areas include:-

Cold Fusion The fate of Fleischmann and PonsDarwinism The forbidden subject

Psychokinesis Robert Jahn and PrincetonFlame-Proof The garden shed chemist who was ignored

Bioenergy Burning Wilhelm Reich's booksRemote Viewing The top psychic spy who was ignored

Ether Drift Did Michelson & Morley's famous experiment really have a null result?