Year Montreal Hosted the Summer Olympics: 1976

Year Canadian Citizens Finished Paying for Those Games: 2006

The 1976 Summer Games were expected to cost $300 million Canadian. Not to worry, however; city officials assured Montreal’s residents that revenue from the Games would cover costs. “The Olympic Games can no more lose money than a man can have a baby,” announced then-mayor Jean Drapeau. You Mister Moms out there (and there are apparently plenty of you) would be interested to know that the final bill for the 1976 Olympics came to nearly $2 billion Canadian. Much of that was public debt paid off by average Canadians, and the final payment wasn’t processed until November 2006. (more…)

The Election Year: 1902, in Saint-Pierre, on the French-owned Caribbean island of Martinique

The Huge Blunder: Governor Louis Mouttet’s poor decision to treat Mt. Pelée, Saint-Pierre’s burgeoning volcano of a neighbor, like a particularly nasty attack ad. Worried that a panic would hurt his Progressive Party’s showing at the polls, Mouttet chose to downplay the possible natural disaster. He first ordered the local paper to ignore the story. Then, three days before the May 11th election, Mouttet made a grand show of traveling to Saint-Pierre himself—despite a bevy of natural warning signs, including enough ash fall to cover the nearby village.

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Prohibition: It certainly seemed like a great idea at the time: Just outlaw liquor and, bam!, goodbye social ills of every stripe—from the Germans to the Irish. Yes, pandering to xenophobia was the favorite tactic among Prohibition crusaders, who painted saloons as a filthy underworld brimming with undesirable foreigners. Ultimately, however, the event that probably did the most to push America toward Prohibition was the country’s 1917 entry into World War I. Prohibitionists began arguing that all of America’s resources were needed to fight the German menace, using the logic that, if the government needed to maximize agricultural production to win the war, then it couldn’t waste all that grain on booze. Apparently, their message worked. By the end of 1917, the majority of Americans were living in alcohol-free states or counties.

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The Problem: Already hounded by U-Boat submarines during World War I, the British military became extremely concerned when intelligence reports suggested that the Germans were developing an even faster version of their deadly subs.

The Solution: Outfit the British Navy with a better ship. In 1915, engineers
designed the K-Boat, a well-armed hybrid between a submarine and a warship.

The Problem with the Solution: The British Navy made the mistake of using engineers actually from Britain. (more…)

In December 1977, President Jimmy Carter planned a trip to Poland, a country whose masses were, at the time, still fiercely huddled behind the Iron Curtain.

What Should Have Happened: Your average, boring-yet-passively-hostile Cold War-era visit. Carter would fly in, say a few carefully chosen words implying that maybe Poland should pay more attention to human rights, which the Poles would then slyly dismiss. Then everybody would go have a big dinner and a few shots of vodka before hitting their heavily bugged hotel rooms. No big deal.

What Happened Instead: A diplomatic snafu famous for being simultaneously politically offensive and hilarious. (more…)

The First Puff: R.J. Reynolds & Co. thought it had it made. The American public wanted a healthier cigarette, and in 1988, RJR was finally ready to give it to them. The company’s solution? A smokeless cigarette. If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it was.

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The Tinderbox: Europe—all of it. By the dawn of the 20th century, the European powers were involved in so many treaties and counter-treaties, it’s a wonder one of the countries didn’t declare war on itself.

The Lit Match: One wrong turn.

June 28, 1914, was just one of those days … that lives in infamy. That was the day Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the less-than-popular heir to the even-less-popular Austro-Hungarian Empire, chose to go on a processional drive through Sarajevo. Surprisingly, this is not the great mistake we’re writing about.

Actually, the first few days of the archduke’s visit to Bosnia went pretty well—particularly considering that nationalists from neighboring Serbia had marked him for death. He even managed to survive an assassination attempt in Sarajevo by successfully playing Hot Potato with a lit bomb that was thrown at his convertible. The bomb exploded in the street, and the archduke continued about his business. Unfortunately, he let his guard down a bit too soon. (more…)

The British Mrs. O’Leary: Thomas Farynor, royal baker to King Charles II of England

His “Cow”: His oven, which sparked a fire in the middle of the night on September 1, 1666.

Oops: Around 2 a.m., smoke woke up the Farynor family and their servants in the house above the bakery. Luckily, the entire lot managed to escape—all except for one maid who was too frightened to run and became the fire’s first victim. The blaze quickly spread, but surprisingly, the conflagration alarmed almost nobody. People from around the neighborhood crawled out of bed to watch it and, when the mayor of London was brought by later that morning, he declared it small enough that “a woman might piss it out.” Yes, that’s a direct quote. But by mid-afternoon, the time to extinguish the fire in said manner had passed. Fed by a dry wind and London’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of flammable objects, it burned for five days, wiping out some 13,000 homes and razing 80 percent of the city. (more…)

In 1956, the Duke starred in an epic biopic about Genghis Khan called “The Conqueror”—a casting decision that probably qualifies as one of history’s greatest mistakes in and of itself. Personally, if we were cast as Genghis Khan in a film that required us to pretend Utah was the Gobi Desert and forced us to spout lines like, “I feel this Tartar woman is for me, and my blood says, take her!,” we’re pretty sure the shame would kill us. Sadly, however, it was more than shame that killed dozens of people involved in the movie’s production. (more…)

One Hard Worker: From the moment he arrived at work on October 17, 2001, Emmanuel Asare knew it was going to be a bad day. A janitor for the tony London art gallery Eyestorm, Asare reported for duty that morning only to find that his employers had trashed the place at the previous night’s party. Surely his heart broke at the sight of half-empty coffee cups, cigarette butts, beer bottles, candy wrappers, and newspapers strewn from one end of the gallery to the other. But rather than turning in a letter of resignation, Asare bucked up and dutifully cleaned up the mess, chucking all the junk into the dumpster out back.

One Harder Truth: Unfortunately, that “trash” turned out to be an impromptu installation by artist Damien Hirst, who’d assembled his masterpiece out of the party refuse. Worse, because of its fleeting and irreplaceable nature, the artwork was valued at more than $9,000. Fortunately for Asare, though, the guy who found deep, symbolic meaning in kegger leftovers also found meaning in those leftovers being thrown away. When told about the janitor’s mistake (or negative review, if you will) Hirst was thrilled, claiming it said something “very key” about his work.

This summer, we’ll be re-running parts of “The 20 Greatest Mistaikes in History,” Maggie Koerth-Baker’s cover story from March-April 2007. For other installments, click here.