And other expensive typos
People like to minimize typos, especially in today’s world of casual communication and 1,000-mile-an-hour news updates. It’s “just a comma.” Who cares if it’s “would of” or “would’ve”? Do we really need to know the difference between “there,” “they’re,” and “their”?
Tell that to the people who wrote these political ads. Or to NASA’s bank account, about 60 years ago.
July 22, 1962, was going to be an expensive day for NASA, no matter what happened. It was launch day for Mariner I, the first of two spacecraft designed to travel to Venus for some long-distance scientific flirting (e.g., “That’s a good-looking solar wind you’ve got going on, baby. Mind if I measure it?”).
Everything was going according to plan. Every preparation had been made. Everything checked and rechecked. The countdown began.
3, 2, 1, liftoff (probably sounding like “pewwwww” or “whoosh” or 10,000 toilets flushing simultaneously).
Moments later, the rocket veered off course. After failing to reestablish control, NASA had no choice but to destroy it.
Imagine all your work (and about $18.5 million, $186 million in today’s money) 1 going up in smoke (literally) in less than five minutes. Hurts right in the ol’ booster, eh?
NASA traced the failure to a guidance antenna on the launch vehicle and—more importantly—a software error: a single overbar (used for the symbol R for radius) in an equation caused the software glitch that led to the “erratic and unpredictable” behavior of the rocket.2
Engineers fixed the typo in the code and Mariner II was successfully launched about a month later.
Just in case you’re consoled by the back-up plan of NASA’s Mariner I mission, let me terrify you with a typo consequence for which there is no take two: eternal damnation.
The Wicked Bible
Robert Barker and Martin Lucas were 17th-century printers with exclusive rights to print the Bible. They published about 1,000 copies of the King James Bible that detractors quickly reported contained numerous errors, the most egregious of which were:
- The omission of the critical word “not” in “Thou shalt not commit adultery” (Exodus 20:14), so the commandment read “Thou shalt commit adultery.”3
- The word “greatness” in Deuteronomy chapter 5 was spelled “great-asse,” leading to the following sentence: “Behold, the LORD our God hath shewed us his glory and his great-asse.” (I’m exceptionally sad to report that at that time “asse” didn’t mean anything more than “donkey” and that some more-recent sources doubt the veracity of the second error’s existence.5 But let us ignore that for the sake of our entertainment.)
When the errors were discovered, the two men were called before King Charles I, given a verbal smack for their sloppiness and assumed moral depravity, stripped of their printing license, and subjected to a hefty fine.6 All except about 20 copies of the “Wicked Bible” were destroyed; the surviving copies are hidden in various museums around the world.
It took about six months before Barker and Lucas paid for their heathen ways, so I guess they can at least be grateful there weren’t any social media hot takes back then. Imagine six months of freedom before you paid for your sins (compared to about six seconds before worldwide humiliation nowadays, for intentional or accidental mistakes alike).
Here are four more expensive and infamous typos, as well as their respective costs, for your enjoyment:
- R-Rated Travel Services (and Other Typo Disasters) ($19 million)
- Freshly Ground Racism, Anyone? ($20,000)
- The Wrong Number of Sons (a reputation, a business, and $14 million in damages)
- A Triple Responsibility (an entire plate of crow, plus a redesign for the next print run)
Do you have any favorite typos with huge price tags? Submit them below.
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1 Henry Walker (2005). The Tao of Computing. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Inc. ISBN 978-0763725525.
2 Paul E. Ceruzzi (1989). Beyond The Limits: Flight Enters the Computer Age. MIT Press. p. 202. ISBN 978-0262031431.
3 https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/thou-shalt-commit-adultery/412222/
4 Rawson Gardiner, Samuel (1886). Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission. Nichols and Sons. p. 305.
5 Campbell, Gordon (2010). Bible: The Story of the King James Version 1611 — 2011. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199693016.
