mental_floss magazine
SUBSCRIBE >
GIFT SUBSCRIPTIONS >
DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTIONS >
subscriber services >
1. The “Computer” That Outsmarted Napoléon
Centuries before Deep Blue started whuppin’ on Russian grand masters, a chess-playing automaton nicknamed “the Turk” was thrashing all manner of chess players. Atop a wheeled wooden cabinet was a seated, life-sized mannequin made of wood and dressed in Turkish garb. The Turk held a chessboard in his wooden lap, and he beat ’most all comers—including Napoléon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Premiering in the 1770s, the creation of Wolfgang von Kempelen moved its wooden arms, seemingly without human assistance, around the board. The secret? The Turk’s arms were operated by a diminutive chess expert crouched inside the cabinet, who operated gears and pulleys to move the Turk’s arms. After traveling the world for almost a century, the Turk ended up mothballed in Philadelphia—where it was destroyed in a fire in 1854. [Photo is of John Gaughan’s reconstruction of “The Turk.”]
2. Microsoft Buys the Catholic Church!
While the pranksters are still unknown, few press releases have had the impact of the 1994 doozy sent out supposedly by Microsoft, announcing Bill Gates’s purchase of the Catholic Church. As reported, Microsoft not only would get sole electronic rights to the good book, but also would pitch in to the church’s efforts, namely by engineering a means for delivering the sacraments online. Needless to say, the prank tricked a few folks. So many customers rang up Microsoft in protest that the distraught company finally felt obligated to clear up the mess via (you guessed it!) another press release. The statement full-out denied the allegations, and further said that it hoped to alleviate customer concerns by declaring that the company had no intentions of purchasing any religious institutions, Catholic or otherwise. Of course, it wasn’t long before another “press release” surfaced, this one touting IBM’s response to Microsoft: a merger with the Episcopal Church.
3. This Is Your Brain on Bananas
When the alternative newspaper the Berkeley Barb published a satirical article in 1967 claiming that smoking dried banana peels could lead to intoxication, they never expected to be taken seriously. But the oh-so-square national news media didn’t get the joke, and publicized the report throughout the nation. Since then, countless wayward teens have been duped into smoking bananas (which can make you nauseated, but not pleasantly so). The hoax really took off, though, in 1970 with the publication of William Powell’s The Anarchist’s Cookbook, which covers all manner of craft pleasantries from building pipe bombs to manufacturing LSD. Not surprisingly, it also provides a recipe for turning your banana peels into “a fine, black powder” suitable for smoking. Even though no one’s ever gotten high from bananas (although they are a great energy fruit, according to Dr. Atkins!), the Barb’s hoax has had a stunning shelf life.
4. The Social Text Fiasco
In 1996, the respected cultural studies journal Social Text published several complex and dense articles, mainly because that’s what respected academic journals do. But one, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Physics,” was a hoax by NYU physics professor Alan Sokal, who sought to prove that academic journals will publish any paper that uses big words. To the extent that Sokal’s article is readable, it makes a grandly silly argument about the political implications of quantum gravity. Among other ludicrous assertions, the article claims that physical reality does not exist, that the laws of physics are social constructs, and that feminism has implications for mathematical set theory. It’s hilarious, if you like that kind of thing, but it’s also utter nonsense. After Sokal revealed his hoax in Lingua Franca, many academic journals beefed up their peer review process.
I love clever hoaxes. Out of these listed here, the Microsoft one is the most believable.
posted by Vivienne on 2-3-2008 at 4:06 pm
Great article, loved it, just came across your site, will come back — nice one
Matteo
posted by Matteo on 2-3-2008 at 4:24 pm
I remember some buddies getting headaches after doing that banana reefer thing. They were desperate dudes, I thought.
posted by affiliate marketing on 2-3-2008 at 4:35 pm
duh…War or the worlds? Orson Welles! Show some cultural literacy please.
posted by wiseass on 2-3-2008 at 4:45 pm
Duh… War of the Worlds wasn’t a hoax. It was a bunch of idiots who didn’t bother to listen to the many “And now back to Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater’s production of ‘War of the Worlds’” after each commercial break.
posted by TDR on 2-3-2008 at 5:02 pm
I have to agree with “wiseass”. Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” wasn’t meant to be a hoax but is by far the largest and scariest hoax of the 20th century.
posted by Richard Colbert on 2-3-2008 at 5:05 pm
Moon landings.
posted by B Aldran on 2-3-2008 at 5:36 pm
Um, sorry wiseass, but show some cultural literacy yourself please. War of the Worlds was not a hoax. It was a book reading on the radio, that many very silly people took the wrong way. There was no intent to bamboozle there. A hoax requires an intent to trick. That is not what H.G Wells reading was.
posted by Jess on 2-3-2008 at 5:38 pm
“Quantum Gravity” not “Quantum Physics”
posted by WJZ on 2-3-2008 at 5:54 pm
Hey Jess:
That was Orson Well’s dramatization of H. G. Well’s War of the Worlds… not just a reading. And historians are still not 100% certain that Orson Well’s dramatization was not done with an intent to trick the public. Show some cultural literacy…
posted by Jaitou on 2-3-2008 at 6:12 pm
actuallly… war of the worlds was a deliberate hoax. it was a government sponsored experiment to guage the public’s panic response to such an event. google it.
posted by qbit on 2-3-2008 at 6:16 pm
@Jess
You should really do a little research before trying to shoot down another commentor.
The famous “War of the Worlds” broadcast was in no way a “book reading”. It was a complete re-invention of the novel, told as a radio play that simulated a news cast. People that did not tune in at the beginning of the broadcast had no idea that it wasn’t the real news.
The entire thing was produced as though it was a factual event that was happening live on the air.
You can do a quick google search for it and download it yourself (since Mental Floss won’t let me leave you a direct link here in the comment)
I can see where it might not technically qualify as a hoax, but calling it a book reading clearly means that you don’t have any idea what wiseass was talking about.
posted by Michael on 2-3-2008 at 6:48 pm
They forgot Jesus.
posted by Taylor on 2-3-2008 at 6:57 pm
what about the Beale Code?
posted by d on 2-3-2008 at 7:25 pm
Tried the banana thing back in the seventies, several times…with no joy…now know why :)
posted by Kem on 2-3-2008 at 7:25 pm
don’t forget negativland!
In February of 1988, a 16-year-old from Rochester, Minnesota named David Brom murdered his entire immediate family (both parents, a brother, and a sister) with an axe. When Negativland was forced to cancel a planned tour in support of their album Escape from Noise for financial reasons, the band issued a press release claiming that they had been “advised by Federal Official Dick Jordan not to leave town pending an investigation into the Brom murders.” The press release implied that Brom had listened to Negativland’s song “Christianity Is Stupid” before the fatal quarrel with his religious parents.[1]
In reality, there was no official named “Dick Jordan”, and Brom did not own any of Negativland’s music (though it was later revealed that he was on SST’s mailing lists). Nevertheless, careless pundits and journalists took the press release at face value, and the hoax received widespread media coverage.[2] Negativland encouraged the spread of the story by steadfastly refusing further comment, supposedly on the advice of their attorney “Hal Stakke”, another fictional person invented by the band. Much of this media coverage was negative, and band member Richard Lyon’s home in Oakland, California was pelted with rocks by an unknown vandal.[3] Negativland subsequently used samples from the media frenzy in their 1989 album Helter Stupid.[4]
(from wikipedia if you can’t tell)
posted by muffugga on 2-3-2008 at 7:41 pm
what about religion?
posted by HI on 2-3-2008 at 7:46 pm
How does Y2K not make the list, let alone #1
posted by Mike G on 2-3-2008 at 7:51 pm
I liked the idea, so I did my own round-up of hoaxes. Alas, the comment thread will not allow me to link to it. It’s on my blog ifn you are curious.
And Wiseass and Jess, I reckon the truth of the War Of The Worlds thing is in between hoax and accident. There wasn’t half as much panic surrounding the broadcast as we think - Welles was just a fantastic self-promoter and pumped stories of people taking the broadcast seriously so that people would realize how awesome he (Welles) was.
posted by Brendan on 2-3-2008 at 7:52 pm
The point of the Sokal hoax wasn’t about academic journals in general, but rather social sciences in particular. The point was to attack the lack of proper peer review among them.
posted by ian on 2-3-2008 at 8:11 pm
not quite so, listen to the actual broadcast, station and program announcement, then the Wotw prologe then, the ‘normal’ music broadcasting then the alert, a very multilayered program.
check out archive dot org for the 1938 Orson Wells radio show.
posted by ferrofluid on 2-3-2008 at 8:17 pm
Don’t forget Al Gore’s global warming!
posted by R Masterson on 2-3-2008 at 8:52 pm
The last one reminds me of the guy who patented the WHEEL.
Of course - that was just to show the flaws in IP laws launched in Australia
Here’s a link - news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1418165.stm
posted by Vivek on 2-3-2008 at 10:48 pm
How about George W. Bush winning the election back in 2000?
Or even better was the reason why we invaded Iraq the second time.
posted by John Holmes on 2-3-2008 at 11:21 pm
don’t forget scientology.
posted by brian on 2-3-2008 at 11:27 pm
I heard if you smoke dried toothpaste, it’ll like totally get you wasted…swear to God!
posted by Bongzilla on 2-3-2008 at 11:56 pm
Did you hear the one about how Republicans are suppose to spend less money than Democrats? Bush is out spending Clinton! Suckers!
posted by Dave Greiman on 2-4-2008 at 12:37 am
Think 9/11 deserves to be #1
posted by marc on 2-4-2008 at 1:34 am
As someone who reads a lot of academic journals: Hooray to Prof. Sokal!
posted by asdir on 2-4-2008 at 9:46 am
Couple of other notable hoaxes that endured for years before being debunked:
Piltdown Man - dunno who made it, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fell for it… but then again, he thought mediums were on the up & up until he started really looking into the charade.
Alien autopsy. ‘Nuff said.
posted by Doc on 2-4-2008 at 10:36 am
A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift suggested the British use the children of poor families as a food source. The funny part is the British actually thought it might be a good idea and considered. Accidental hoax?
posted by Jorin on 2-4-2008 at 3:11 pm
what about my monster under my bed? lol
i have no cultrual literacy… so if you say, ur a dumbass.
posted by sonofabeesh on 2-4-2008 at 4:13 pm
I know its not as cheerful a hoax as these, but what about the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion?”
There are people out there today, hundreds of years later still believing it…I would think that would make this list.
posted by Peter on 2-4-2008 at 5:28 pm
Google has nothing on “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Physics,”. You sure this hoax isn’t a hoax?
posted by Deadguy on 2-5-2008 at 4:22 pm
Try again:
google.com/search?q=Transgressing+the+Boundaries%3A+Toward+a+Transformative+Hermeneutics+of+Quantum+Physics&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
posted by Jason on 2-5-2008 at 4:32 pm
What about Vista ?
posted by steamboat on 2-6-2008 at 7:26 am
The “Constitutum Donatio Constantini” has to be one of the biggest and longest enduring. From Wikipedia:
“Purportedly issued by the fourth century Roman Emperor Constantine I, the Donation grants Pope Sylvester I and his successors, as inheritors of St. Peter, dominion over the city of Rome, Italy, and the entire Western Roman Empire, while Constantine would retain imperial authority in the Eastern Roman Empire from his new imperial capital of Constantinople. The text claims that the Donation was Constantine’s gift to Sylvester for instructing him in the Christian faith, baptizing him and miraculously curing him of leprosy.”
“In 754, Pope Stephen II crossed the Alps to anoint Pepin king, thereby enabling the Carolingian family to supplant the old Merovingian royal line. In return for Stephen’s support, Pepin apparently gave the Pope the lands in Italy which the Lombards had taken from the Byzantine Empire. These lands would become the Papal States and would be the basis of the Papacy’s secular power for the next eleven centuries.”
“nserted among the twelfth-century compilation known as the Decretum Gratiani, this document continued to be used by medieval popes to bolster their territorial and secular power in Italy. It was widely accepted as authentic, although the Emperor Otto III did denounce the document as a forgery. The poet Dante Alighieri lamented it as the root of papal worldliness in his Divine Comedy. It was not until the mid 15th-century, with the revival of Classical scholarship and textual critique, the Church had begun to realize that the document could not possibly be genuine.”
posted by Ronald on 2-22-2008 at 8:43 am
My mom lived in Queens and listened to the original War of the Worlds broadcast. When I asked her if it scared her, she said she knew very well that it was a radio show, that in fact it was part of a series that she listened to every week. I’m not sure if all the shows in the series were sci-fi or not, but she said that anybody who was a regular listener had no problem telling that it was just a radio play.
posted by Ginny on 2-27-2008 at 1:46 pm