7 typos that came at an incredibly high price

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

History knows cases when a seemingly insignificant grammatical error turned into serious trouble. The cost of the missing letter or hyphen resulted in multi-million dollar losses. In our review there are 7 historical facts that clearly prove that you need to write correctly.

1. NASA's lost hyphen

It would seem that the hyphen in the Russian language is far from the most important sign, but in 1962 the absence of this sign in the on-board computer code cost NASA $ 80 million. We are talking about the launch of the Mariner-1 spacecraft, heading for Venus. Due to a small error, the device lost control, and at the 293rd second of flight it was destroyed. Several years passed, and British scientist and writer Arthur Clarke wrote that Mariner 1 was destroyed by "the most expensive hyphen in history."

2. The missing letter in an old ale

The unlucky seller lost more than half a million dollars because of the missing letter "p" in the name of the 150-year-old ale. Before the auction, several collectors knew that one of the lots would be a bottle of antique Allsopp's Arctic Ale, but they could not find it, because a bottle of Allsop's Arctic Ale was put up for sale due to an error. As a result, only two people traded for the lot, and the bottle was sold for $ 304. The person who bought the bottle corrected the grammatical error and raised $ 503,000 for it at the next auction.

3. A mistake in the Bible that changed the meaning of one of the main commandments

In 1631, the Bible was published in England with an error in the seventh of the 10 commandments. The publishers missed the "not" particle, and the commandment called "commit adultery." This edition of the Bible, known as the Bible of the Adulters, was destroyed and the publisher was fined $ 5,500.

4. Racist pasta

In Australia, a cookbook "Penguin" was published, which included a recipe for pasta, which recommended seasoning them with "freshly ground black people". It was actually a corrector error, and it was about "freshly ground black pepper". The sold circulation was not withdrawn, and 7000 copies, which had not yet been sold, were destroyed and printed again.

5. Stocks at disastrously low prices

At the end of 2005, a trader at the Japanese company Mizuho Securities received an order to sell shares at 610,000 Japanese yen apiece. But he confused everything he could and put up 610,000 shares at a price of 1 yen. This mistake became fatal - the Nikkei index collapsed in the market, the management of the Tokyo Stock Exchange resigned, and the damage due to the mistake of an unlucky trader amounted to $ 340 million.

6. Erotic-exotic vacation

A few years ago, the California-based travel company Sonoma decided to place its corporate banner in the Yellow Pages. When advertising began to pay off, marketers realized how badly they were wrong. In the directory, instead of "exotic travel" they offered "erotic" ones, as a result the company received absolutely not the popularity it had hoped for. The management of the travel company went to court, and they managed to sue the printing house for $ 10 million.

7. Record Expensive Promotion

In 2007, marketers at a Roswell, New Mexico-based auto sales company came up with a brilliant publicity stunt. They decided to issue and mail out 50,000 lottery tickets, one of which was supposed to bring its owner a $ 1,000 win. But the printing house made a mistake, and absolutely all the tickets of the circulation turned out to be the winning ones. This brings the total winnings to 50 million. The car dealer was unable to pay off the debt and promised to issue a five-dollar gift certificate for each ticket that won.

Sometimes books are removed from circulation not at all because of typos. On 10 most famous books that are banned in different countries imposed a taboo for other reasons.