Everyone makes mistakes, so the saying goes. The problem is that the word “mistake” doesn’t hold a lot of meaning. Sure, it means something wrong happened but you get no sense of gravity. Dropping your toast butter side down is a mistake, but so is forgetting to place a seal on a rocket ship that causes it to explode. Some mistakes can be quite a bit costlier than others. 

10. Lou Reed Got All Royalties From A Tribe Called Quest’s Hit Can I Kick It

If you don’t know Lou Reed you’re missing out on one of the greats in the history of music. The Velvet Underground frontman was a singer, songwriter, and inspiration to countless others. He was also never shy about sharing his thoughts. 

In 1990, A Tribe Called Quest released a track called Can I Kick It, which is still one of their most memorable hits. But there was a problem with it. The group sampled a lot of music in the production of the song and one of the things they sampled was Lou Reed’s bass line from the song Walk on the Wild Side. And they never asked Lou Reed for permission. 

The record label didn’t clear the rights and when Reed found out, he didn’t deny them access to it. He simply told them they’d have to pay. A Tribe Called Quest never received a dime in royalties from the song as a result, all of it going to Reed instead thanks to the label’s mistake. 

9. US Forces Accidentally Built a Fort in Canada

A lot can go wrong in the world of construction. One of the credo’s for any carpenter is measure twice and cut once. You really need to be sure what you’re doing. But you also need to make sure you have the where down as well, or all the expert craftsmanship in the world won’t save you.

The border between the United States and Canada is one of the longest in the world and, for the most part, the neighbors get along well with this arrangement. It’s almost a straight line from one coats to the other but there are a few wonky bits, especially around the Great Lakes and up to the east coast. This ended up contributing to the shameful story of Fort Blunder.

Originally called Fort Montgomery, this US military base was built in 1816 in an effort to ensure another Battle of 1812 wasn’t on the horizon. It was to have 30 foot high walls and overlook Lake Champlain where it could prevent another British invasion.

The problem was that the maps were not read correctly, and the fort was built a mile into Canadian territory instead of on American soil. It wouldn’t be until sometime in the 1840s when Britain and the US reached a firm agreement on borders that Canada lost a little land and the fort was given back to the US with a small tweak to maps. 

8. Crypto.com Accidentally Refunded Someone Over $10 Million

Remember Monopoly? One of the Community Chest cards you could get in the game awarded you $200 thanks to a bank error in your favor. As kids, many of us hoped to one day be on the receiving end of such a blessed mistake. 

In real life, bank errors are few and far between and they are rarely in your favor. Even if they seem to be in your favor, legally the money still isn’t yours and those who have benefitted from them in the past had to give it back. But what about a cryptocurrency exchange? 

A woman who was looking for a $100 refund on Crypto.com ended up having $10.5 million refunded instead. As one would expect, she immediately went out and spent a lot. She even bought a house that cost $1.35 million.

How did such a mistake occur? Following an audit a full seven months later, the website realized that someone had entered an account number in the payment section by mistake. That oversight led to an epic spending spree.

The site ended up suing the woman and the Supreme Court in Australia froze her accounts and ordered her to sell the house and return the cash. 

7. Soccer Fans Keep Mixing Up Bucharest and Budapest

Geography is not everyone’s strong suit, especially beyond the borders of where they live. Surveys have revealed geographic illiteracy is a huge problem worldwide. For the most part this may never affect you in your day-to-day life, but it might if you find yourself booking flights to places you don’t want to go.

In Europe there seems to be a pervasive issue in understanding the difference between Budapest and Bucharest. Budapest is in central Hungary. Bucharest is in Romania. They’re about 400 miles apart.

Back in 2012, over 400 Spanish fans who planned to watch their team play in a Europa League soccer game loaded up on planes and flew to Budapest to see the match. When they got there, they discovered the game was being played in Bucharest. 

In 2021, French fans did the same thing in reverse when they arrived in Bucharest for a game that was being played in Budapest, proving no one reads maps or names very well before booking plane tickets. 

6. Astronaut Alan Bean Ruined Apollo 12’s Camera

Everyone and their uncle uses a cell phone to take pictures nowadays but back in the day, you needed a “real” camera. Once upon a time that meant using film, something very rare these days. Part of the reason is that film can be a fickle media. You can’t just keep taking dozens of pictures with film because you run out. It needs to be developed, handled carefully, stored properly, all that jazz. You also want to not point any of it directly at the sun, especially if you’re in a place with no atmosphere.

When Apollo 12 was headed to the moon for our second visit, there was a lot less pressure on the whole mission. There was still interest, but it waned when everyone on Earth realized they wouldn’t be able to watch. That was all thanks to a mistake by astronaut Alan Bean.

As you can imagine, camera equipment being sent in space to document a moon landing in full color was sensitive and expensive. Bean, not fully appreciative of this, ended up pointing the camera directly at the sun. With no atmospheric filter of any kind, the sun destroyed the camera pretty quickly, reducing the trip to an audio-only affair and dampening enthusiasm the world over.  By the time crews returned for Apollo 14, networks literally cut away from coverage to put soap operas on.

5. NASA Accidentally Sold a Bag That Had Been on the Moon

One of the most exciting things that can happen on a shopping trip is finding a mis-priced item. Most stores follow a rule where they will sell it to you for the price on the label, even if the label is a mistake and you’re getting a great deal. But not every sale follows those rules.

In 2015, a government auction on eBay included a small white bag. A woman in Illinois bought it for just under $1,000. The bag was from NASA and it had been to space. But there had been a mixup and the bag that was sold had been up in Apollo 11 and had actually been used to collect the first samples of moon dust. It was supposed to have been one from Apollo 17 that went to space but never left the lander.

When the new owner of the bag sent it to NASA to confirm it was real, she trusted that they’d confirm or deny and send it back. They did not. Instead, they kept the bag and told her it was sold in error and that it “belonged to the American people.” They offered her a refund instead.

A lawsuit resulted from the disagreement and a judge ruled in the woman’s favor. She ended up selling it at auction in 2017 for $1.8 million.

4. A Boy Tripped and Punched a Hole in a $1.5 Million Painting

The comedy pratfall has been a staple of laughing at other people’s pain for generations. Everyone loves watching someone else fall down. But sometimes a person goes above and beyond in their tomfoolery and doesn’t just trip, they trip epically. Such was the case for a 12-year-old schoolboy in Taipei who was visiting the local museum.

In 2015, the Huashan 1914 creative arts center had a Da Vinci-inspired exhibit which featured a 17th-century painting called Flowers by Paolo Porpora. As the boy was approaching the painting he tripped and, as most people would, he put his hands out to try to catch himself. Unfortunately, that ended with him putting his hand right through the $1.5 million painting.

A few anxiety attacks later the boy was mostly let off the hook since insurance would cover the restoration damage, but it was a valuable lesson for all in the importance of keeping art either behind glass or at least a velvet rope.

3. Steve Rothstein Cost American Airlines $21 Million in Unlimited Flights

History is rife with tales of companies trying to run clever promos that backfired, like when Red Lobster underestimated the cost of an endless crab promo that cost the boss her job and cost the business hundreds of millions. 

American Airlines made the same mistake by offering an unlimited flight promo for $250,000. They must have thought anyone who took up the offer would not take $250,000 worth of flights, or at least not much more. But they did not see Steve Rothstein coming.

Rothstein bought his pass and proceeded to clock more than 10,000 flights. He flew friends to Europe; he flew strangers home, he’d even fly out on business trips in the morning and be home on a new flight for dinner, all first class. Sometimes he’d fly to another city just for a sandwich he liked.

The cost to American Airlines was estimated at $21 million. The company finally canceled his unlimited pass on the grounds of fraud. Because Rothstein sometimes invited strangers to fly with him, he’d book his companion seat under made up names because he didn’t know who was coming with him. The airline claimed that as the reason to terminate his ticket. 

2. William Shanks Wasted years Incorrectly Calculating Pi by Hand

Everyone’s favorite irrational number pi has been calculated to over 100 trillion digits. Thank computers for that. But before computers, mathematicians were doing it the old-fashioned way with pen and paper and it was not easy. Just ask William Shanks.

Shanks was born in 1812 when pi had only been calculated to 152 digits. By 1873, Shanks had devoted years of his life to unraveling the number and had reached 707 digits. Keep in mind that, prior to computers, calculating a new digit in pi could take days or even weeks of work.

It would be decades later when another mathematician, going over Shanks’ work, discovered he had miscalculated at digit 527. The end result was years of work being rendered useless.

1. Andres Escobar Was Killed For Scoring a Goal on His Own Team

Professional athletes are under a lot of scrutiny at the best of times and rabid fans will turn on someone at the drop of a hat if they feel they are underperforming. You can imagine how bad the reaction might be if a player were to accidentally score a point for the opposing team,then. Or maybe you can’t, since this one’s almost unbelievable.

In 1994, Andrés Escobar accidentally scored a goal against his own team during the World Cup. Escobar, previously a popular and skilled player, just screwed up. The goal cost them the match and dropped them from the competition. Colombian fans were beyond enraged. 

Just over a week after the game, a group of men attacked Escobar on the street, at first mocking and insulting him for what he did. Then things escalated. One of the men pulled a gun and shot him six times in his car. 

Officials believed the killer, the bodyguard for some drug traffickers, had been paid to kill Escobar because his bosses lost money on the match, but that was never proven.

A lot of students hate math, even though the world runs on mathematics. Huge sums of money and equipment worth millions of dollars have been lost simply because someone made some tiny math mistake. Computers also have made errors like this, too, but that can still be blamed on humans since we did the programming.

To be clear, some calamities were caused by errors involving complex math, which is arguably more forgivable. However, the ones we have here are mostly ridiculously simple mistakes that even an elementary school student might not have made.

10 Gulf War Scud Missile Attack

On February 25, 1991, an Iraqi “Scud” missile struck a US Army base in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 soldiers and injuring 100 others. The disaster was surprising, considering that the base was protected by a Patriot missile air defense system. Investigations revealed that the system did not attempt to intercept the Scud.

The error was traced to the software powering the clock of the system. The clock recorded time in deciseconds (one tenth of a second) but stored that data as an integer. It converted the time into a 24-bit floating point number to do this. However, rounding the times in order to convert them led to gradually increasing inaccuracy as the system operated. As a result, the system was not able to intercept missiles after 20 hours of continuous use.

At the time of the attack, the Patriot missile battery in question had been operating for 100 hours. The time disparity was such that it looked in the wrong part of the sky for the incoming missile and therefore found no target. The US Army had been made aware of this software issue and had released an update on February 16. The update only reached the Dharan base on February 26, a day after the attack.^[1]

9 Spain’s S-80 Submarine Program

In 2003, Spain launched the $2.7 billion S-80 submarine program to build four diesel-electric submarines for the Spanish navy. Spain had almost completed one of the submarines in 2013, when it discovered that the sub was 70 tons heavier than it should have been. The Spanish navy feared the submarine would never surface if it went underwater.

The submarine ended up heavy after someone put a decimal point in the wrong spot during calculations. No one discovered the error until the first submarine was completed, and the other three were already under construction. Spain later signed a $14 million deal with Electric Boat of Groton, Connecticut, to help them reduce the weight of the 2,200-ton submarine.^[2]

8 Air Canada Flight 143

In July 1983, an Air Canada Boeing 767 flying from Ottawa to Edmonton with 69 passengers and crew had to crash-land after running out of fuel at 12,500 meters (41,000 ft). The engines suddenly lost power, and the airplane started gliding to the ground. It glided for 100 kilometers (60 mi) before landing in Gimli, Manitoba.

It came down on a racetrack that had originally been a runway. Luckily, there were no deaths. However, two people had minor injuries, and the nose gear was destroyed. This landing earned Flight 143 the nickname of “Gimli Glider.”

The accident was traced to a conversion error. Air Canada used the imperial system of measurement but was converting to the metric system, which this Boeing 767 already used. Air Canada ground crews had used the imperial system when they refueled the airplane. They measured the fuel in pounds instead of kilograms.

One kilogram equals 2.2 pounds. This meant the airplane had only around half the amount of fuel it required to complete the flight. The pilots did not notice the discrepancy because the fuel gauge was not working. Ground crews used drip sticks to measure the fuel at the time they filled the tanks.

Interestingly, the ground crews made the mistake twice. The first was in Montreal, and the second was in Ottawa. The airplane made the Montreal-to-Ottawa flight without incident but literally flew into problems when it was flying from Ottawa to Edmonton.^[3]

7 Sinking Of The Vasa

On August 10, 1628, Sweden launched a new, heavily armed, and large warship: the Vasa. The vessel had barely sailed for 20 minutes when it sank less than a mile from shore. Thirty people died in the sinking. The ship was later retrieved in the 20th century and is now held at the Vasa Museum.

Historians measured the entire ship and discovered that its builders used two different units of measurement. One was the Swedish foot, and the other was the Amsterdam foot. A Swedish foot is 12 inches, while an Amsterdam foot is 11 inches.

The difference between both units of measurements caused one side to end up heavier than the other. This was why the ship leaned to one side and promptly sank after it was hit by two gusts of wind. Historians add that the effect of the wind was worsened by the fact that the top of the ship was heavier than its bottom.^[4]

6 Mars Climate Orbiter Crash

The Mars Climate Orbiter was a $125-million joint project between Lockheed Martin and NASA/JPL. The project suffered an embarrassing end when the orbiter most likely crashed into Mars due to a simple conversion error in 1999. Lockheed Martin used the imperial system of measurement while programming software, but NASA used the metric system.

Engineers at NASA would have detected the error if they’d been paying attention. However, they did not. No one realized something was amiss throughout the Mars Climate Orbiter‘s nine-month journey to Mars, either. The mistake only became obvious when NASA lost contact with the orbiter.

In response to the incident, John Logsdon of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute said the whole thing was “dumb.” John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists added, “It was embarrassing to lose a spacecraft to such a simple math error.”^[5]

5 Ariane 5 Rocket Explosion

On June 4, 1996, the European Space Agency’s Ariane 5 rocket exploded 37 seconds after takeoff. Onboard the spacecraft were four satellites. The rocket and satellites cost $370 million. The accident was traced to an integer overflow error in the software used for launching the rocket.

An integer overflow is a mathematical error that occurs when the figures generated by a system exceeds the memory of that system. The Ariane 5 operated on 16-bit software capable of storing figures up to 32,767. The rocket managed to generate figures way above that.

The European Space Agency used the same software they’d previously used in Ariane 4 rockets. They had problems with the Ariane 5 because it was faster than the Ariane 4. Faster means larger figures. The software could not handle the large readings, causing the rocket to go rogue. Ground control ordered it to self-destruct.^[6]

4 Bank Of America’s Dividend Payments And Stock Buybacks

The Federal Reserve regularly makes banks undergo stress tests. A stress test is the analysis of the financial condition of a bank under a stimulated negative economic situation. Stress tests are necessary to determine if a bank is healthy enough to overcome a terrible recession or financial crisis.

In 2014, Bank of America revealed that it had passed a Federal Reserve stress test for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis. The bank added that it was going to pay dividends to its shareholders and buy back $4 billion worth of stock. The bank later retracted the statement and revealed that it had made some mistakes.

Bank of America had not passed the stress test. It only thought it did because it had made a mistake in determining the values of some bonds owned by its subsidiary, Merrill Lynch. Shareholders weren’t happy, and the stock of the bank fell by $9 billion (five percent of its total value) the same day the error was revealed.^[7]

3 The Laufenberg Bridge Problem

A while back, Germany and Switzerland agreed to build a bridge over the Rhine between their cities on either side, both named Laufenburg. As per the agreement, each country would start construction from their side of the river and meet in the middle. The bridge was nearing completion in 2003, when both nations realized that one half of the bridge was 54 centimeters (21 in) higher than the other.

The error came up because of how each country defined the term “sea level.” Most countries have different methods of determining the sea level, considering that it’s not the same everywhere. Germany uses the North Sea to define its sea level, while Switzerland prefers the Mediterranean sea.

There was a difference of 27 centimeters between the countries’ respective sea levels. Germany and Switzerland knew this and had factored it into their calculations. However, someone did so in such a way that the disparity was doubled, causing one side of the bridge to rise by 54 centimeters more than it should have.^[8]

2 France’s Oversized Train Problem

In 2014, Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer francai (SNCF), France’s state railway operator, discovered its new high-speed trains were too wide for 1,300 stations across the country. The problem was that it had ordered 1,860 of the trains from Alstom of France and Bombardier of Canada. SNCF determined that it needed to reduce the width of the trains so that the stations could accommodate them. The error cost millions of euros.

The incident generated some displeasure in France; the transport minister referred to it as “comically tragic.” Canard Enchaine, a weekly satirical paper, made a cartoon in which commuters on a platform were told to “pull in their stomachs” as one of the new trains approached the station.

The mistake happened because French train stations vary in size. SNCF knew this and had requested the Reseau ferre de France (RFF), which was in charge of the tracks, to measure the space around the tracks. SNCF and RFF ended up with some problems after it was realized that RFF had skipped 1,300 older stations in its initial calculations. These stations were narrower than others. It was too late, as some trains had been delivered, and more were under construction.^[9]

1 The Amsterdam City Council’s €188 Million Housing Benefits Error

In December 2013, the finance office of the Amsterdam city council sent out €188 million to over 10,000 poor families living in the city. The city later discovered that it had made an error in the payments. It originally planned to send €1.8 million and not €188 million.

The payment software was programmed in cents and not euros. People received €15,500 instead of €155 and, in one case, €34,000 instead of €340.

Luckily, the city had been able to recover all of the money except for €2.4 million at the time the error was revealed in the news. It was expected that the city would have a hard time recovering €1.2 million of that. That is a substantial amount, along with the €300,000 the city had already spent on rectifying the calamity.^[10]