FACTORALY - E38 MISTAKES

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

We all make mistakes. Sometimes they make things better, sometimes, they make things worse, and sometimes they end up creating whole new industries and products! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello Simon! Hello Bruce! How are you today? I'm awesome, thank you very much. How are you? I'm very well indeed. I've realised that we have a recurring theme where I ask you how you are and you come up with a different adjective each week. This was never planned, but it's something we've settled nicely into. I'll have to try and copy it and do repeats so that people can't tell the difference between one episode of Factorily and the other. Indeed. So an episode of Factorily, you say. Please tell us what Factorily. And the other. Indeed. So an episode of Factorily, you say. Please tell us what Factorily is.

So Factorily is a podcast. Indeed. All we do is we take a very dry subject or generally a fairly dry subject or a subject that is either massive and condense it down to 30 minutes or a subject that is really tiny and then expand it to 30 minutes all the while being entertaining. Yes. I mean, that's what it says on my business card. This week's episode, we are going to be talking about mistakes.

Yes, we are, because you read that when you uploaded the podcast. Now, I'll start off by saying we were talking previously about whether or not we should do an episode on mistakes we take a subject we both go away and do our research we come back and it all works out harmoniously and perfectly until muggins here accidentally researches the wrong topic a week in advance so if you've listened to last week's episode on poison, Bruce, poor bloke, had to research that in a very, very short space of time before we came to record because I'd mistakenly looked up the wrong subject. Yes. So it happens to all of us. It does happen.

We are all but human. Indeed. So mistakes. The word mistake, the definition of a mistake, is an act or judgment that is misguided or wrong. So nice and generic. The word mistake, it's an old Norse word. I didn't realize this. It's an old Norse word and it means to take in error.

So, mistake. And it covers everything, doesn't it? It's such a generic word it's it could be yes i mean i had trouble with this subject because i was like trying to differentiate between a mistake and an accident yeah so was i yeah absolutely there there are there is a crossover yes um accidents happen by mistake and mistakes happen by accident. Yes. So where on earth do we start? Mankind has been making mistakes since forever. I expect animal kind have been making mistakes since forever as well.

It's a blooming big topic. And there are small mistakes. There are big mistakes. There are small mistakes that lead to really, really big ramifications. yes um and that's where i've spent some of my time wasn't there a big mistake that happened in space where um one one team was working in metric and one team was working in imperial oh yes okay and uh things didn't go well they they lost a satellite for a while didn't they they they sort of misplaced where in orbit this satellite was because they were using different...

Different SUs. Different SUs, exactly that. There was another NASA one in which a programmer simply placed one too many hyphens in a piece of code and a rocket was operating in a very unusual way and they had to blow the thing up and start all over again. Oh my God. Can you remember how many millions one of those hyphens cost?

Absolutely, yes. Yes, that's a very expensive hyphen. Yes. I read that there was a German banker who fell asleep and sort of like nodded off on his keyboard. Yes. And he accidentally transferred €222,222,222 to a customer.

Oh, my goodness. That's a mistake. That's a very bad mistake. So, yeah, the basis for my research on this one, there's no linearity to this. There's no nice grouping of categories. All I've done is found some of the biggest blunders in history and written them down to talk about them because I couldn't think of another way of doing it excellent well that's quite right and I think what's happened is I mean we talked about the occasion we make mistakes at the beginning of uh what we were what we were going about to record

and then let's change um what also tends to happen is that Simon comes up with stuff that I don't come up with yes and I come up with stuff that Simon doesn't come up with indeed so it sounds like today Simon you've come up with stuff that I doesn't come up with. Indeed. So it sounds like today, Simon, you've come up with stuff that I haven't discovered. Well, let's hope so. I mean, if we had mistakenly both come up with the same mistakes, then that would be very dull indeed. It's such a broad subject that we've made enough mistakes in history to be able to pick from them. Exactly. There are just so many. There are websites dedicated to the biggest blunders in history. You know, things that really, really changed the course of events for the rest of the world.

And some of them are quite obvious. Some of them are not. I won't go into too many details, but a few things I never actually realised. Apparently, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot, which started off World War I. Apparently he wasn't meant to be there at the time. But there's not a lot more to say about that.

Well, there's an awful lot more to say about that. There's too much more to say about that. That could be an entire episode on its own. So somebody else got injured, which meant that Franz Ferdinand reversed back the route that he was... Because the guy who was going to assassinate him missed him. Yes. And then because this other guy got hurt in – I think it was a bomb blast or something.

Right. He decided he was going to accompany him to hospital, which meant they retraced the route back. And this guy got himself a sandwich. And he suddenly saw the Royal Cavalcade coming back the other way. And then, oh, where's my gun? Where's my gun? Quickly. Then grabbed his gun as Archduke Ferdinand came back past him on the way to the hospital and shot him.

And it wasn't actually a lethal shot at the time. But they had sewn Franz Ferdinand into his uniform because he was a bit chubby. Oh, I see. Franz Ferdinand into his uniform because he was a bit chubby. Oh, I see. So to actually get the uniform off him to get to the wound took a bit longer than they anticipated. Oh, no, you're kidding me. So just because he had to be physically removed from his suit, that led him to bleed out? Yeah, so that was a fair old mistake. Okay, so that's a double whammy then, isn't it?

That's several mistakes all in one. Exactly. Lots and lots of mistakes that started a great war. There was another one I found out about Hiroshima, the dropping of the atomic bomb. The US and the UK and Russia and whoever else was involved at the time sent an ultimatum to Japan in 1945 saying, you know, you need to end this thing. Yeah. And the Japanese premier sent a one-word reply to this ultimatum, which was the Japanese word mokusatsu, which was intended to be no comment or no reply or remain silent. Yes. Someone at the receiving end took that Japanese word and translated it as silent kill,

which the Allies took as a threatening message and therefore they went and dropped the bomb. Wow. There are disputes as to how accurate that story is and whether it would have just gone ahead and happened anyway. As with all apocrypha, I think we should just believe it. Good use of apocrypha. Gorgeous word. Well done.

So what have you got? What mistakes have you found? Well, one of my favourites so far is something called the Adulterer's Bible, which is a printing error. Okay. So this was one of a number of early printed Bibles, and they made a slight typo on the Seventh Commandment. Right. Which read, Thou shalt commit adultery. Oh, they'd missed out the word not. Yes.

It was, yeah, it was called the adulterer's Bible. It was one, in 2018, one of these Bibles sold for $50,000. Oh my goodness. Yeah, not good. Was it a whole run of them? It wasn't just one individual book? Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's loads of them. Wow. Oh, that's awkward. King James would have been very upset. One thing I found, which I had never heard this before, it may be standard fare and everyone knows it, I may just be incredibly behind,

but do you know about the titanic's binocular keys yes i do but please go ahead okay i'd never heard this before now the titanic everyone knows the story everyone's seen the film um really big ship uh hit an iceberg caused a leak it sank spoilers if you haven't seen the movie. Sorry. Or read anything. Or read anything ever. And there are lots of elements to this. There are lots of different elements as to why this happened. There was an issue around the construction. There was an issue around this. There was an issue around that. There was bad weather. There were lots of icebergs. All this sort of stuff. But something I hadn't realised was that there were no binoculars in the crow's nest

available at that time and um the reason for that was that um there was a last minute change of um staffing on the titanic before its maiden voyage the second officer was a chap called david blair and he um he was reassigned to another ship called the Olympic. And he was rather miffed. He wrote a letter to a relative saying, this is a magnificent ship and I feel very disappointed that I'm not going to make her first voyage. He was the captain on dry land, wasn't he? He's the dry dock captain.

They have two captains when they're building a ship. That's it, yes. So he was reassigned to the Olympic. Someone else took over. As he was reassigned to the Olympics. Someone else took over. As he was packing and leaving the Titanic, he took with him, by mistake, the key to the crow's nest locker. And in the crow's nest locker was a pair of binoculars that the lookout needed to use

in order to spot things like icebergs coming a long way away. And again, lots of speculation. It would have happened anyway, you know. But many people sort of propound this idea that, well, if that locker key hadn't been missing, they would have been able to open the locker, get the binoculars out, seen the iceberg with more warning and possibly dodged it.

But yes, the common story is that the Titanic sank because of a missing key. Yeah. But yes, this key, this legendary key, David Blair passed the key to his daughter and it sort of carried on, you know, being a family heirloom. Yeah. In 2007, this key was sold at auction for £90,000. A key? A key. And it was bought by the CEO of a Chinese jewellery retailer. OK. And it's now on display in an exhibition in Nanjing in China. How about that?

Isn't that great? I'm not sure I would really want to promote my business by saying, this is the key that sunk the Titanic. Indeed. I looked up the most misspelt word. Oh, okay. Which is quite interesting. Actually, there are quite a few. Okay.

One of them is questionnaire. Right. One of them, I mean, mean of course nobody spells diarrhea correctly but potato lots of people put an e on the end oh really okay and definitely is is yes the biggie yes i'm assuming that everybody listening to this is now doing exactly what i'm doing i'm picturing those words in in my head to see if i know how to spell them yes some of them are ambiguous it's not not definitely. No, it's not definitely. Definitely. Definitely, yes. There you go. If you take nothing else from this episode, you now know how to spell definitely.

So, yeah, there was another printing error in America. It was a stamp. Right. And in 2010, the U.S. Postal Service decided to issue some new stamps. Yeah. And they ordered up nearly 3.6 billion stamps with the Statue of Liberty on them. Okay. Which is fine. Only it wasn't the Statue of Liberty in New York.

It was the replica in Las Vegas. Oh. Oh. And they basically sued them for royalties. The people in Vegas sued the post office for $3.5 million in royalties for using the image of their Statue of Liberty, which is slightly different to the real one. Brilliant. of liberty which is oh my goodness slightly different to the real one brilliant actually since we're on that i i only found out relatively recently that the um i mean it's really it's really obvious when you say it out loud some of these things isn't it but the statue of liberty wasn't green to begin with yeah um the statue of liberty is made out of copper yeah and when it

was first built it was you know the color of a shiny new penny yes um but somehow other, they hadn't quite taken into account the fact that it was placed next to the sea, where there's a lot of salty air and water around. And within not terribly many years, it started to oxidise and turn green. Shall we assume they did that on purpose, because they wanted it to be that nice green colour? Go on then. Yeah, let's assume that. Yeah. Let's go with

that okay you all know because you're listening to this that this tends to go down lots and lots of rabbit holes yes and i got stuck on one of tattoo mistakes. Okay. And there are some doozies. A lot of them are visual. So what you have to do is you have to go to the show notes at factorily.com and I'll put a whole load of pictures of tattoo mistakes. Wonderful. In the show notes. The most common thing that people do in tattoo mistakes is to spell your incorrectly

without an apostrophe and an E. Okay, yeah. So I'll put a few of those in. Great. But my favorite one was there was a woman who decided to join Hell's Angels and wanted Satan's slaves written on her back. Yeah. Only it said Stan's slaves because they forgot the A. That's great.

Stan's slaves. Wow. I read one, not because of this research, but just I remember from the past someone once had a tattoo which had some beautifully, beautifully scripted chinese writing yes um the the owner of the tattoo assumed to be some kind of wonderful old chinese proverb a confucian saying i don't know if it's true or not but uh someone managed to translate this this image online and it said um you've just ordered the sweet and sour pork

again i think i hope it's true as you went sort of down the tattoo area i went down the um school exams oh right um i had a a brief time as a as a part-time exam invigilator at a local secondary school yes which was jolly good fun and i remember there was one particular day that um i had a person raise their hand and call me over and say um i think this this maths question is wrong and um i said okay well do do your best and i'll make a note and i'll tell someone and then another hand went up another hand went up all of hand went up, all of these hands went up.

One of these maths questions was incorrect. And that made me wonder whether that has, you know, has been a thing before. Yes. Again, it's sort of every now and then in the news you hear about these examining boards having made a boo-boo of sorts. Yeah. And I just found a few of them. There was a website that listed the top five exam mistakes of all time. Some of them are really simple.

Some of them are ridiculously obvious. There was a geography exam only last year in which Africa, a map of Africa was shown and Gabon was mistakenly labelled as the Republic of Congo and the question was, you know, this country that we're pointing to here tell us about that country

and it was the wrong country there was another one, there was an A-level English literature exam in Wales there were four pages that weren't printed out, there were four blank pages and these pages happened to contain all the excerpts from bits of in Wales. There were four pages that weren't printed out. There were four blank pages. And these pages happened to contain all the excerpts from bits of Shakespeare that the following pages had questions about. There was another exam where they simply mislabeled the

different parts of a river and said, which is the fastest flowing part of this river? Yeah. It was the wrong one so simple mistakes but with obviously quite big ramifications for the students and um a couple of these questions the examining board said well okay we'll just give everyone full marks for that one particular question because it's not your fault yeah which i thought was very fair and decent yes and then i thought what about the students who would have got that question wrong anyway? They've just gained four bonus points. Yeah.

But yes, it happens quite a lot by the sound of things. There are lots of mistakes in the world that turn out not to be mistakes. Okay. Or that they can capitalize upon. Right. And again, I found this a bit of a rabbit hole because I started off on this journey starting with penicillin,

you know, discovered by mistake. Oh, of course, yes. And then... Happy mistakes. Happy... serendipitous. Yes. And things like, you know, the pacemaker was discovered by mistake.

A guy was working on an oscilloscope and he accidentally took out the wrong wire and then realized that this actually was sending a very small electrical signal, which was exactly in the right timing to kickstart a heart. And a guy called James Wright in 1943 was trying to work out a um a substitute for rubber and he came up with this stuff that was very very elastic and if you turned it into a ball it bounced okay so silly putty oh really is that the origin of silly putty oh great um saccharine famously constantine falberg um he was looking for things that you could do with coal tar. And he'd been playing with this stuff and then picked up a cigarette and put it between his fingers and then he tasted the cigarette and the cigarette tasted sweet.

Or there's that he actually went to the canteen for a sandwich and picked up a sandwich and the sandwich tasted sweet. And then he went back to his lab because he couldn't work out which of the substances that he's been playing with was saccharin. Oh, I see. And so he basically licked all of them. Of course he did. Until he found the one that was sweet. That's great.

Then there's Scotchgard, which was, again, another rubber thing in the 60s. Somebody dropped a bit of rubber on their shoes and then realised it was actually displacing water. It's quite good. Okay. But there are... I'm just going to list them because there are so many of them.

There are so, so many. Like from popsicles, which was like fruit juice left out in the cold. Matches, which became friction lights. It's completely an accident. Inkjet printers, mistake. Wasn't supposed to be an inkjet printer. Post-it notes, again, we talked about this in Glue.

Another mistake. X-rays, complete fluke. Alfred Nobel. Discovered dynamite by accident. Warfarin, accident. Mauve, accident. Valium, accident. Mauve, accident. Valium, accident. Just so many of them.

The slinky. I mean, the slinky was a guy in the American Navy who was trying to look at things on a shaky ship. How do you keep things stable? So he invented this spring to keep things stable and he dropped it off the bench and as he dropped it off the bench it kind of did that slinky thing and that's interesting and this this was in 1943 during the during the second world war right um and a slinky is as an, a slinky is 67 feet of wire. Is it really?

Yeah, 67 feet. Compressed into two and a quarter inches high. Yeah. And Richard James made an absolute fortune from slinkies. He then joined a cult. Okay. And lost everything. No way.

Gave all the money to the cult. Ah. But his wife, I think her name was betty right kind of took over the patent and and made a success of the company excellent bubble wrap oh come on oh i know this one um textured wallpaper correct my namesake alfred fielding yes and um um mitch uh chavanis um yeah textured wallpaper for the beat generation, for all the hippies. Yes.

They then thought, they're not really buying this wallpaper lark. Yes. Maybe we should have a look at something else that we could use it for. And they tried greenhouse insulation. Right. Before settling on bubble wrap.

They started a company called the Sealed Air Corporation, which is now a massive company in America. Play-Doh we did an episode i can't remember which episode this featured in but um play-doh started off as a as a putty type subject that you rubbed on the wall to get rid of the um yes from your coal fire exactly exactly and then they sort of accidentally realized there this would probably be quite a good thing to play with if I put some colour in it and gave it a funny almondy smell. Ta-da, Play-Doh. Yeah. I mean, John Wesley Hyatt, there was a prize of $10,000 going for somebody who'd come up with an alternative for elephant tusk ivory in billiard balls.

Okay. So he was trying to come up with a substance that would actually replace ivory. Yeah. And he came up with celluloid no way just like that amazing his brother isaiah took the project on it's just so much of it that's all like mistakes that people make and yet so my advice tip all of you out there if you want to invent something or discover something, go in completely the opposite direction first and then see what you've got. Yeah, yeah. One thing I've found, Companies House, who keeps a record of every registered company in the country, they simply misplaced a single letter S

and it ended up in them being sued. In 2009, Companies House wrote that Taylor & Sons Limited had gone into liquidation. They actually meant Taylor & Son Limited. Oh, wow. They just added the S to the end of Sons. And Taylor & Son had indeed gone into liquidation. Perfectly right.

But Taylor & Sons, a 124-year-old engineering firm in Wales employing more than 250 people, had not gone into liquidation at all. But because it had been written and the news published, their clients suddenly started ringing them up and saying, what's all this I'm hearing about you going into liquidation? What's going to happen to my order? I'm going to withdraw my account from you. At the time that this happened, the managing director was on holiday and he started getting threatening messages saying, you've skipped the country whilst your company goes into liquidation all this sort of stuff um and

because of that purely because of that speculation all of their customers withdrew they lost all of their custom they became bankrupt and they did actually have to go into liquidation because of this one misplaced s and the company ended up suing Companies House for £8.8 million because of this tragedy. All of those people lost their jobs. Companies House said in court, it was just a simple, unforeseen mistake. It could have happened to anyone, not our problem.

The judge said, no, you've ruined this company's entire fortune and the fortune of the people involved you will pay this money so it all came out okay in the end but crikey what an error goodness me well that's that's all i have on on mistakes unless i've made a mistake somewhere that's all I have as well. I'm sure there are many, many more to be researched, but it would take too long. So that is at least our chosen few. Have we made any mistakes?

Well, I was going to say, if our dear listeners, if the Factoralites happen to have noticed any mistakes that we've made whilst talking about mistakes, then please tell us. Thank you very much for listening to Factorily. Please come again next time. Do please. Bye for now. Cheerio.