technology

I used to believe that nuclear power stations consisted of a giant room where they set off nuclear bombs, then siphoned off the energy from the explosions. Therefore the main danger of these power stations was that the giant room might be unable to hold in the explosion.

Anon

I used to belive that if one could manage to put a camera in front of the eye of an animal one would discover what things looked like for the animal when developping the film.

Ida

When I was about six, I had a friend visiting from Miami that really liked a certain purple bracelet I had. On the day she was leaving, she asked me for it, and I wanted to give it to her, but I only had one of them. I thought I would be clever, keep mine, and make a duplicate for her...in my grandparent's copy machine. Much to my dismay that this huge machine only gave me a black and white picture of the purple bracelet. My friend wasn't impressed. Sadly, Xerox machines are not omnipotent. But I really thought it would work.

J Luna

I used to believe that the thing the doctor looked in your ear through was actually a camera, kind of like a digital camera, that could store pictures of the inside of your ear on its "screen". I used to get really mad because he'd let my parents see the "pictures" but not me.

Jesufer

When I was younger and I was looking at some photos of me and some friends. I saw that one of them had red-eye, me not knowing what had happened figured that he was the devil! I blanked him and ran away, until I got a phonecall home to my mum from the school asking why me and the boy werent friends, I told my mum he was the devil and showed her the photo to prove it, she burst out laughing and told my teacher the whole story!!

Charlie

We were talkin gabout a holiday a load of us were going on with our school when one of my friends commented on the fact she was gonna take diposable cameras so hers wouldn't get lost when another girl piped up "i don't see the point of disposable cameras, you spend all that time trying to get the pictures right, then you throw the camera away!' She was 13 at the time...

Sophie

Well when I was little I used to beleive that fax machines rolled the paper into a little roll and then send them through little pipes to the owner. It took me years before I relized that they just scanned them.

Talk about a paper jam!

Anon

When I was little I beleived there was a factory in Germany to which you could send money and a blueprint of anything at all, and they would build it for you.

Magnus

I used to think that a "photocopier", was a machine that made duplicates of photographs as good as the originals, glossy paper and all. Ordinary Xerox machines were just plain "copiers".

Anon

When I was about four, a friend and I thought we were quite the scientists. We planned to build space ships to fly into space, and always wanted to build robots. I used to spend all my library time at school reading up on how to build spaceships, and decided that we would have to be able to go faster than the speed of light to get where we wanted to in time.

One day I was visiting my friends house, and we were supposed to be building as robot, but my friend had lost the "chip" before i came over (the "chip" is the part that makes the robot work). I was really upset, until we decided we could just get a new chip from inside a battery. We started attacking a AA battery, but only black goo was coming out (battery acid). I told my friend, and he said, it's ok, the black goo is just in there to protect the "chip". I never found it, but for years I believed all i needed to make a robot work was the illusive "chip".

Geek

I used to believe that contact lenses were made out of fish scales

ddm

When I was young I saw my Dad's Popular Science magazines and they would talk about the "Internet Super Highway" that was coming. I thought it sounded way cool. I assumed we'd all be literally surfing on a crazy highway in the sky.

Christy

When I was growing up in the early 80's, I thought that when my parents called the "operator", they were calling this one lady that they knew, and she knew everyone's phone number, her name was "operator"

Anon

I used to believe (because a relative told me) that if you didn't jump off an escalator or moving walkway when you got to the end, you would get sucked underneath and chewed up by the mechanism.

Fi Craig

When I was little I thought the microwave was the Michaelwave because my name is Michael.

Michael

When I was a kid, I asked my dad about the meaning of the AM/FM switch on the radio. He said that if you changed the switch, the radio would turn into a different radio. I had the image of doors folding and unfolding and the radio becoming much bigger -- more like a home stereo (AM -> FM ?). I was very careful *never* to touch that switch, because I didn't want my daddy to lose his portable AM radio.

Greg Conquest

I thought that the word Copyright was like copying your right hand on the copier.

Anon

I once told my sister, when she was about 6, that she was being too noisy and I couldn't concentrate on my work. She, really believing she was being helpful, advised me to play a blank tape to myself on a Walkman so that I wouldn't hear her!

Jude

I use to think that I would be able to emit light from a regular piece of paper by coloring it with the three special colors(green, blue, and red)TV pixels showed when zoomed in. I believed these three colors were what gave luminition to any surface!

Armando

When I was really little my mother told me the vacuum cleaner would suck my lungs out if I touched it, and I believed her. Vacuums STILL scare me, a source of great amusment as I'm now 19 and in college.

NotAnotherExit