mental_floss Blog » Greatest Mistaikes

An Olympic-Size Error

the mag — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:30:56 +0000

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.

Obscenely underestimated costs weren’t the only problem with the Games, though. The main Olympic Stadium wasn’t even finished in time for the Olympics. Its progress was slowed by a construction strike, bad weather, and a physically impossible design. Ten years after the games had taken place, while construction was still ongoing, engineers had to make major changes to support the stadium’s retractable roof. Unfortunately, that just led to more roof-related havoc.

During its 20 years in use, the rip-prone Kevlar top required $700,000 in annual upkeep.

Fed up, the city finally just replaced the thing with the less-flashy non-retractable kind in 1998. Still no luck. When covered with ice and snow, the new roof was unstable, forcing the stadium to close during the winter (when its value as an indoor arena would be at its highest). What’s worse, now that Olympic Stadium is paid in full, the city is hesitant to take responsibility for it. That’s because the facility’s key tenant, baseball’s Montreal Expos, relocated to Washington, D.C., in 2005.

—This summer, mental_floss is re-running parts of “The 20 Greatest Mistaikes in History,” Maggie Koerth-Baker’s cover story from March-April 2007. To order the back issue, click here. To see other installments in this series, click here.

Go Tell It On The Mountain: The Mistake Every Politician Should Remember

the mag — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 09:30:16 +0000

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.

To Mouttet’s credit, there was no such thing as a volcanologist at the time. All he had to go on was the mountain’s past activity, which bordered on mildly annoying, at worst. But Pelée’s reputation (and Mouttet’s) changed forever on May 8, when a searing hot cloud of gas rushed down the mountain, engulfing Saint-Pierre.

In an instant, nearly 30,000 people died — including Mouttet.

In fact, per most accounts, only one man in the entire city proper lived through the eruption—Louis-Auguste Cyparis, a prisoner who survived incineration thanks to his windowless, underground cell. He was pardoned for his troubles and went on to a brilliant career with the Barnum & Bailey Circus.

The Most Sobering Mistake in U.S. History

the mag — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 09:30:02 +0000

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.

The Dry Party began on January 17, 1920, when the Volstead Act went into effect. All across the nation, Prohibitionists got down and boogied—as best they could. In Norfolk, Va., this included a mock funeral for the alcohol effigy “John Barleycorn,” featuring 20 pallbearers and a horse-drawn hearse.

The Wet Party began on January 17, 1920. Within hours of the Volstead Act’s passing, bandits reportedly began looting train yards and warehouses, making off with thousands of dollars worth of whiskey that had been reserved for medicinal uses. Despite steep penalties (a first offense meant a potential $2,000 fine and 18 months in prison) Americans went right on producing, selling, and drinking booze.

In fact, statistics indicate that more Americans were drinking than ever before.

Far from being dead, saloons were flourishing. By 1930, there were 32,000 speakeasies in New York City—more than twice the number of legal drinking establishments in town before Prohibition. Two years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for the presidency on a platform of “a New Deal and a pot of beer for everyone.” For a nation beleaguered by alcohol-financed organized crime, the offer was too good to pass up. Six months after Roosevelt entered office, the Not-So-Great Experiment came to an end.

That Sinking Feeling

the mag — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 09:30:13 +0000

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. Look, we love “Doctor Who,” and everybody knows shepherd’s pie is the world’s most undervalued casserole, but there’s a reason we buy German cars—and the K-Boat is a perfect example why. Weighing nearly 2,000 tons, the beast was clumsy on the surface and took five minutes to dive (not great when you’re trying to escape enemy bombers). Once below water, the K-Boat often had trouble resurfacing (again, not something you want to hear as a sailor).

After testing began in 1916, the boats started displaying even more worrisome tendencies. Model K13 sank during initial trials, killing all on board. Later, K4 collided with K1. Then, in 1918, a flotilla of K-Boats and other ships were on a practice run when K14 collided with K22, setting off a chain reaction of crashes during which a cruiser rammed and sank K17, and K6 slammed into K4, cutting it in half. In fact, K-Boats managed to claim the lives of 250 British soldiers (and not a single German) before they were finally sent to the scrap heap.

President Jimmy Carter’s Carnal Mistake

the mag — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 09:30:50 +0000

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. The problem stemmed from Carter’s Polish translator, Steven Seymour, a freelance linguist who was hired by the State Department for $150 a day. Although an accomplished and respected translator of written Polish, Seymour turned out to be less-than-apt with the spoken word. During his speech, Carter said he’d come to learn about the Polish people’s desires for the future—meaning their political and economic desires.

During the translation, however, Seymour used a word that suggested the president was instead interested in the Poles’ carnal lusts.

And for a second round of humiliation, when Carter later mentioned leaving for his journey back to the United States, Seymour translated it to mean Carter had abandoned America forever. Having thoroughly confused the Poles (and creeping them out in the process), Seymour further sullied his translation with Russian words—a big no-no in a country with a long history of anti-Russian cultural antagonism. Not surprisingly, he was soon replaced.

The Least Addictive Mistake

the mag — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:30:15 +0000

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.

After spending around $1 billion to develop and market the Premier smokeless cigarette, not even R.J. Reynolds’ chief executive could stand it. His exact quote? Unfortunately, we can’t print it in mixed company, but let’s just say he wasn’t thrilled with the flavor. And that wasn’t the only problem. Taking a drag off a Premier wasn’t so much a matter of breathing in as it was producing a vacuum force roughly equivalent to the strength of a black hole. Add to that rumors that the Premier could be hollowed out and used as a handy crack pipe, and after a mere four months in test markets, RJR pulled the product.

Can’t Have Just One: Amazingly, the company tried the same trick again in 2000, unveiling a new smokeless cigarette, this time called Eclipse. Pitched as the “next best choice” to quitting, independent studies revealed that it actually produced more toxins than regular, low-tar cigarettes. Even worse, another study revealed that 99 out of every 100 Eclipses had glass fibers in the filter that could easily find their way into a smoker’s lungs or esophagus.

The Worst Parking Job in History

the mag — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:30:41 +0000

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.

Just hours later, toward the end of the motorcade, Ferdinand’s driver took a wrong turn and stopped the car, accidentally landing them in the worst parking spot in history—right in front of Gavrilo Princip, one of the main conspirators in the failed bombing. Princip thought fast and improvised, fatally shooting the archduke. One month later, Austria-Hungary declared retaliatory war on Serbia. That led Russia to jump to Serbia’s aid, prompting Austria’s ally, Germany, to declare war on Russia, whose ally, France, then declared war on Germany, which responded by invading Belgium, and—voilà—World War I.

The Mistake That Burned Down London

the mag — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:30:10 +0000

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.

Even after the main blaze died down, small fires remained for months afterwards.

But It Wasn’t So Bad, Really: For one thing, the hapless Farynors were never held responsible for the fire. In the immediate aftermath, most average Londoners were more interested in blaming Catholic extremists from France. Meanwhile, government authorities were so busy saving random foreigners from impromptu lynch mobs that they had no time to worry about the royal baker. Amazingly, the Great Fire of 1666 (as it became known) did bring about some good—it killed off most of London’s rat and flea populations, thus bringing an end to the Great Plague of 1665.

The Mistake That Killed John Wayne

the mag — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:30:39 +0000

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.

Turns out, much of the filming for “The Conqueror” was done in Utah’s Snow Canyon, about 150 miles downwind from a U.S. nuclear testing facility.

Wayne, along with director Dick Powell, costars Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendáriz, and Agnes Moorehead, and additional cast and crew members, lived in the shadow of this fallout for three months. The first signs of trouble cropped up in 1963 when Powell died of lymphoma and Armendáriz killed himself after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. More cancer deaths followed: Moorehead in 1974, Hayward in 1975, and John Wayne in 1979. Although the Duke’s passing was popularly attributed to his years of smoking, People magazine later muckraked records showing that no fewer than 91 of the 220 people who worked on “The Conqueror” had contracted cancer—and more than half of those had died.

A Heartbreaking Mistake of Staggering Genius

the mag — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:30:32 +0000

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.