When battle plans backfire
Engineering errors that made history
Lost in translation and calculation
Ecological and nature backfires
schopenhauer A translation error by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev escalated the Cold War.
schopenhauer Spot the historical typos to discover how tiny mistakes cost millions of dollars.
schopenhauer Mars Climate Orbiter
We wrote down pounds instead of Newtons (oh-oh!) / And lost our spaceship to the red sky (yeah we did!)
schopenhauer Early European mapmakers mistakenly depict California as a giant island
schopenhauer Differences between English and Māori texts of the Treaty of Waitangi cause decades of dispute.
Space mistakes: The 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter loss cost NASA $125 million, all because of a simple failure to convert imperial units to metric units.
schopenhauer Nikita Khrushchev's words are mistranslated as a nuclear threat, escalating Cold War tensions.
An incorrect calculation or estimate. In 1999, NASA lost a Mars orbiter because software mixed up metric and imperial units.
Which two languages were used in the conflicting versions of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi?
In 2009, a spelling mistake by a UK government registry mistakenly declared which 124-year-old company bankrupt?
In 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's phrase 'We will outlast you' was mistranslated as what?
Which Spanish king finally issued a royal decree in 1747 declaring that California was not an island?
Which aerospace contractor built the Mars Climate Orbiter using imperial measurements?
For over a century, European maps mistakenly depicted California as what geographical feature?