43 Items Tagged

Mistakes

The Rodin portrait correctly identified by Luis Pastor.

Solved: A Case of Mistaken Identity in a Madrid Art Museum

Auguste Rodin takes his rightful place in the portrait gallery, evicting King Leopold II of Belgium.

Matthew Taub June 6, 2019

Newmarket, England

Potoooooooo

A misunderstanding gave this 18th-century racehorse a most amusing name.

"Tempio del Dio Ridicolo."

The Latin Typo That Gave Us the Temple of Ridicule

Ancient Rome never had an "Aedicula Ridiculi," but plenty of people thought it did.

Caroline Wazer April 12, 2019

Park Tunnel entrance.

Nottingham, England

Park Tunnel

An engineering error ensured this cavernous 350-foot-long subterranean thoroughfare was never used as intended.

The two mummies at the Albany Institute of History and Art.

Albany, New York

The Mummy Ankhefenmut

A CT scan revealed the identity of this 3,000-year-old mummy that everyone erroneously thought was female.

The flag of the kingdom in front of a local museum.

Laadla, Estonia

Kingdom of Torgu

A clerical error gave rise to this imaginary micronation in the southwestern corner of Estonia.

Caryatids at St Pancras Church.

London, England

Coade Stone Caryatids

A measuring mishap led to these artificial stone ladies losing their stomachs.

The replica gypsum furnace.

Castalla, Spain

La Foia de Castalla

This site is both a remarkable reminder of the town's mining history and a fantastic government blooper.

Lake Placid Murals.

Lake Placid, Florida

Lake Placid Murals

Many of the murals covering this sleepy Florida town hide some sort of intentional error.

A timeline of tape.

Two Harbors, Minnesota

3M Birthplace Museum

This institution celebrates the happy accidents of uncommon sticktoitiveness.

The site of Buster Keaton Studios.

Los Angeles, California

The Many Plaques of Buster Keaton Studios

The silent film master's legacy commemorated in all the right and wrong places.

Restored furnace top allows visitors to look down into the structure.

Moira Furnace

This early 19th-century blast furnace only survived because it was a financial and technical failure.

Inscription above the entrance to the courthouse.

Old Perry County Courthouse

The nearly 200-year-old building displays a perplexing grammatical error.

The supposedly upside-down windows on the first floor.

Savannah, Georgia

Sears Mishap House Myth

Local myth claims this is a Sears catalogue home with its windows installed upside-down.

These mystery specimens don't have identification numbers to compare against the museum's register.

natural history museums

A Researcher's Quest to Decode the Specimens on a Museum's Mystery Shelf

Sifting through the old, unlabeled, puzzling jars that fill a collection's junk drawer.

Jessica Leigh Hester April 20, 2018

Rayne, Louisiana

Wrong Way Cemetery

The above-ground crypts at this Catholic cemetery face north-south instead of the usual east-west.

A linguistic scramble.

Norway's Olympic Team Bought 15,000 Eggs due to a Google Translate Mistake

It added an extra zero.

Anne Ewbank February 8, 2018

Half beaver, half tiger.

Irkutsk, Russia

The Irkutsk Babr

Thanks to a spelling mistake this bizarre beaver-tiger hybrid became the symbol of a Siberian town.