Many people already have a healthy fear of going to the doctor. Unfortunately, that fear may be well-founded, especially when you consider the horrific mistakes that happen every day in hospitals around the world. Most people have heard horror stories of medical instruments being left in patients, a common mistake that happens to an estimated 4,000 people every year in the US. However, there are many other medical and surgical errors that still happen to unsuspecting patients, often causing severe injuries or death.

10Surgery On The Wrong Person

This is a mistake that the National Quality Forum considers a “never event.” This means that it’s a serious reportable event (but not necessarily something that’s completely preventable) that is hoped to never happen in a hospital. But in many cases, the problem is preventable, like when surgeries are performed on the wrong person. Even with new protocols, there have still been reported errors in which the wrong patient has received an invasive surgery. In a prostate biopsy mix-up, one man had his healthy prostate removed while the man who needed his cancerous organ removed was left untreated.

One of the most horrifying examples in recent history was when a woman woke up just before her organs were harvested for transplant, like something out of a gory horror movie. Not only did they mistake her for someone else, they mistook a living person for a corpse. Luckily, the 41-year-old woman opened her eyes just as surgeons were about to remove the organs. Although the surgery was stopped in time, the fact that the surgical staff was about to remove organs from a patient who was still alive points to a plethora of mistakes that are horrendous to contemplate.

9Air Embolisms

The very air that keeps humans alive can also kill them during surgery. Air that is allowed to enter the bloodstream during surgery can cause a blockage in the circulatory system, an event known as a venous air embolism. Air embolisms in surgery are rare, but they still occur more often than they should. Air embolisms can cause a pulmonary embolism—or blockage in the lungs—which is the leading cause of preventable hospital-related deaths.

Venous air embolisms from catheters have a 30 percent fatality rate. Even people who survive can be left with permanent physical disabilities, such as severe brain damage. What is most frightening about air embolisms is that they can happen during very routine surgeries, yet are extremely deadly. For example, a seemingly simple dental implant surgery recently turned fatal when an oral surgeon gave air embolisms to five patients in one year, killing three of them. The air is thought to have been introduced into the patients’ bloodstreams through the hollow dental drill.

8Blood Transfusions

Receiving a blood transfusion during a hospital stay is common—it’s estimated that 1 in 10 hospital stays where a medical procedure is performed will involve a blood transfusion. Unfortunately, this routine aspect of medical care can also be extremely dangerous when mistakes are made, most commonly when the wrong blood is given to the wrong patient. Out of every 10,000 units of blood that are transfused to patients, it is thought that one of these units is the wrong blood for the intended patient.

The most common mistakes in blood transfusions revolve around identifying the blood and patient correctly. Blood can be incorrectly labeled when collected, the wrong blood can be dispensed, or medical personnel can administer the wrong blood during surgery or at the patient’s bedside. From July 2008 to July 2009, there were 535 blood transfusion errors reported through the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority alone. Fourteen of these mistakes resulted in serious adverse effects, and one patient died during surgery.

7Wrong Surgeries

One of the surgical mistakes that’s considered a “never event” is when patients receive the wrong surgery. In a study of medical lawsuits, 25 percent were for patients who received a different surgery than what they were scheduled for. Over a 20-year period, 2,447 lawsuits were filed for surgeries that were performed for the wrong procedure.

Despite all the safety procedures that have been put in place to ensure that wrong surgeries do not happen, they continue to occur more often than acceptable. One woman had her fallopian tube removed instead of her appendix, while another patient received a heart operation that was not needed. One of the most tragic stories is that of a pregnant woman who was scheduled to have her appendix removed in 2011. Instead, her ovary was removed, leaving the infected appendix inside her. The woman was readmitted to the hospital three weeks later when the mistake was discovered, but unfortunately, she miscarried and died on the operating table.

6Wrong Medication Or Dose

Most people assume that the medicine they receive from their doctor or pharmacist is the correct drug at the correct dose, but millions of people every day get the wrong prescription. Out of over three billion prescriptions that are annually doled out in the US, it is estimated that 51.5 million errors occur—that’s 4 out of every 250 prescriptions filled. The danger is twofold: Patients could receive harmful drugs that they don’t need, or they could not receive the drug that they do need. Either case can be fatal.

These medication errors happen at both pharmacies and hospitals. One tragic example is when two premature twins died due a nurse’s fatal mistake. The babies, who were born at 27 weeks at Stafford Hospital, were given a lethal dose of morphine—650–800 micrograms instead of the 50–100 micrograms they were supposed to receive.

In another fatal drug error, a 79-year-old man was given the paralytic drug pancuronium—one of the drugs used in lethal injections—instead of an antacid for his upset stomach at North Shore Medical Center in Miami, causing the man to become unresponsive within 30 minutes.

5Infections And Contaminated Medical Supplies

Most people go to the hospital to be treated for illnesses, yet this is also where many diseases and infections originate. Exposure to deadly illnesses through contaminated medical instruments or poor staff hygiene isn’t something you hear about too often, but it occurs with alarming frequency. Between 2012 and 2014, dozens of patients were exposed to the fatal Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from contaminated surgical instruments in at least four different hospitals in the US.

Infection from contaminated equipment is another “never event” and also one which is completely preventable. According to the most recent US Center for Disease Control’s Healthcare-Associated Infections Progress Report, preventable infections from hospitals in the US are improving but are still too prevalent. It is estimated that 1 in 25 hospital patients contract an infection while in the hospital, with about 75,000 people dying due to these infections every year.

4Misdiagnosis

It’s understandable that extremely rare diseases might be misdiagnosed. The popular TV show House was based on exactly that premise. However, there is no excuse when symptoms of common ailments are overlooked due to incompetence.

It is estimated that 80,000 Americans die each year from ailments that are misdiagnosed. One woman went to the emergency room complaining of neck pain and a headache, but was having trouble vocalizing her symptoms. The rushed emergency room doctor dismissed the issue as just a muscle pain, releasing her with only pain medication. The next day, the woman was readmitted to the same emergency room and died of cardiac arrest from the stroke she had apparently been having the day before. The doctor who had treated her the previous day admits that he should have recognized the signs of stroke, blaming himself for her death.

3Urgency

Anyone who has been to the emergency room lately knows how crowded they have become. However, you’d assume that those in need of immediate assistance would still receive the care they need. This is not always the case. Too often, patients are left untreated when the medical help they need is just down the hall.

One 39-year-old woman was admitted to a Bronx, New York hospital just before 5:00 AM after complaining of abdominal pain. Although the woman was listed as “urgent” and blood tests were drawn, she remained untreated until well into the afternoon. Finally, the physician in charge of her case ordered a CAT scan and noticed fluid accumulation. They brought the woman in for surgery to search for an embolism. She died on the operating table, 13 hours after she was admitted to the hospital for a treatment that she should have received within minutes. What makes this story even more tragic is that, if they had followed up immediately on the initial blood tests, they would have easily recognized that she had internal bleeding and she could still be alive today.

2In-Hospital Accidents

The Agency for Healthcare and Research Quality (AHRQ) estimates that close to a million patients each year sustain a fall while they are under medical supervision in a hospital. The agency estimates that about one-third of these falls can and should be prevented.

The misuse of bed rails in hospitals and long-term care facilities is also a major concern. The FDA has documented almost 500 deaths from the use of bed rails, admitting that there are probably many more deaths that have not been correctly attributed to these devices. Patients who are very ill and have limited mobility can become wedged in between their hospital mattress and the bed rail, causing suffocation and strangulation.

1Operating On The Wrong Body Part

Surgeries on the wrong body part—such as amputating the wrong appendage or removing the wrong kidney—are some of the most common surgical mistakes. The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study which estimated that 1,300–2,700 of these “wrong body part” surgeries are performed every year in the US—that’s about 40 per week. Even with precautions, such as physically marking the body before surgery, these inexcusable surgical errors still occur.

In Rhode Island, one hospital performed three brain surgeries on the wrong part of the brain in less than a year. All three incidences involved the same brain surgeon. In 2010, a man in Florida had his healthy kidney removed instead of his gall bladder, which was the intended organ. The surgeon was fined only $5,000 for his error.

Rebecca is a full-time freelance writer from Washington state. Visit her at her LinkedIn or view her freelance writing profile on Elance.com.

They say that “necessity is the mother of invention.” Every day, a new scientific breakthrough occurs or a new product is invented to solve a problem or fulfill a need. Scientists and inventors often spend years researching and refining their discoveries.

However, it is surprising to find out that many common household items were created by mistake during this research process. Some inventors found that a lab mistake could be adapted to a new purpose straightaway. Others were discarded, only to be repurposed many years later.

Most households around the world wouldn’t be without these laboratory mishaps today.

10 Nonstick Cookware

Where would we be without our nonstick cookware? Scraping off the eggs burned onto the bottom of the frying pan and trying to pry muffins out of baking trays, that’s where.

Teflon, or PTFE as it is known in the scientific world, would have to rank as one of the most useful kitchen inventions. However, polytetrafluoroethylene was actually invented by mistake in 1938 when DuPont scientist Roy Plunkett was developing a new CFC refrigerant.

Sawing open a gas canister used in his experiments, he discovered a reaction had occurred between the tetrafluoroethylene gas and the iron shell of the canister. The result was a waxy, repellent substance for which he initially saw no use. Further experiments on the slippery substance eventually saw it used in manufacturing and military equipment.

It wasn’t until 1954 that anyone thought to coat cookware with the substance to stop food from sticking to pots and pans. Frenchman Marc Gregoire was thinking of coating his fishing gear with Teflon to stop it from tangling when his wife suggested that nonstick cooking pans would be more useful.^[1]

Most cookware used today is coated in a variety of Teflon.

9 Post-it Notes

Post-it Notes would have to be one of the most useful items of stationery. The sticky little squares of paper can be found in any home or office. We use them to bookmark pages, stick handy reminder notes to the fridge or computer, and leave phone messages.

Yet this common stationery item was developed by mistake. Dr. Spencer Silver was a chemist working for 3M in 1968. His research into a super-strong glue seemed to have failed when instead he came up with a very weak adhesive that would only stick things together for a short time. What good was that to anyone?

It wasn’t until 1973 that the worth of this new adhesive was recognized. Arthur Fry, one of Dr. Silver’s colleagues, began using this temporary glue to bookmark the pages in his hymnal.

By 1980, 3M was producing small squares of paper lined with a coating of glue along one edge. Today, we use more than 50 billion of these handy little sticky notes each year.^[2]

8 Safety Glass

Man has been using glass since the earliest civilizations. We use it in windows, cookware, jewelry, and decorative items. Blowing glass into decorative pieces is an ancient art form.

However, the main limitation of glass has always been the fact that it breaks into jagged, potentially dangerous pieces. So it is surprising to find that it was only in the last century that someone found a way to make glass safer.

Today, you will find safety glass in motor vehicles, windows, and cookware. It is tougher and less likely to break into jagged shards. Yet this stronger glass was discovered by accident rather than design.

French chemist Edouard Benedictus accidentally knocked a glass beaker onto the ground in 1903. He was surprised to find that it shattered but did not actually break as it contained cellulose nitrate which had left a film inside the glass.^[3]

This plastic-coated glass was further developed during the early 1900s and was first used for the lenses in gas masks during World War I. Various forms of safety glass have been developed since Benedictus’s discovery, and today, safety glass is mandatory in cars, buildings, and some cookware.

7 Microwave Oven

There are very few homes today without a microwave oven. The handy kitchen appliance certainly changed the way we cook. However, the microwave wasn’t an intentional invention. Percy Spencer, a radar engineer, was conducting experiments on a magnetron, a new vacuum tube in 1945.

During the experiment, Spencer noticed that a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. He grabbed some popcorn and, to his surprise, found that the magnetron also made the popcorn “pop.” He had accidentally stumbled upon a new way of cooking.

Raytheon marketed the new microwave oven as a “RadaRange” in 1946. The initial ovens were costly and too bulky for most kitchens. They were the size of a modern refrigerator and took 20 minutes to warm up before you could actually cook anything in them.^[4]

It wasn’t until the late 1960s that the smaller, cheaper versions found in most homes were developed.

6 Plastic

We can find plastic everywhere in most modern homes—from kitchenware to toys, furniture, and even packaging. Society is becoming increasingly aware of the environmental effects of this man-made substance, with worldwide attempts to minimize the use of plastic.

Ironically, plastic was developed to protect wildlife by reducing the need for ivory, tortoiseshell, horn, and other animal products as well as minimizing the industrial use of our natural resources.

In 1869, John Hyatt answered a New York firm’s call to find a substitute for ivory billiard balls. He found that combining cellulose (derived from cotton fiber) with camphor produced a substance which was flexible, strong, and moldable.

His newly discovered “celluloid” could be used in manufacturing instead of animal by-products, and it was even used in filmmaking. This new synthetic product would reduce the slaughter of animals for the use of their horns, tusks, and shells in manufacturing.

Leo Baekeland was researching an alternative electrical insulator to shellac in 1907. Expanding on Hyatt’s invention, he developed “Bakelite,” the first fully synthetic plastic which could also withstand extremely high temperatures without melting.^[5]

Chemical companies soon began researching and developing new plastics for every use imaginable—from wartime equipment to furniture, cookware, and motor vehicles. The applications for plastic were endless.

Given the origins of plastics, it is ironic that they have become an environmental concern, with more people returning to naturally produced products.

5 Super Glue

A researcher at Eastman Kodak found himself in a sticky mess when he was trying to invent a plastic lens for gunsights during World War II. Yet a handy little tube of the adhesive he had discovered can probably be found in most kitchen drawers around the world.

Harry Coover initially thought that his cyanoacrylate was useless as it stuck to absolutely everything it touched.^[6]

In 1951, he and colleague Fred Joyner were looking for a temperature-resistant coating for jet cockpits. After spreading the cyanoacrylate between two lenses during scientific experiments, they were alarmed to find that they could not pull the lenses apart, which ruined expensive laboratory equipment.

It was then that they realized the potential for this glue, which almost instantly bonded two surfaces together. Super Glue was first marketed in the late 1950s and has become a popular remedy for many small household repairs today.

4 Stainless Steel

Stainless steel is something we take for granted in our modern lives. Cutlery, kitchen appliances, medical equipment, motor vehicles, and even skyscrapers all use the strong, noncorrosive metal.

French scientist Leon Gillet first made a steel alloy mix in 1904. However, he failed to notice the rustproof properties of this new metal compound.

In 1912, metallurgist Harry Brearley was experimenting to find a rustproof gun barrel. During his research, he had added chromium to molten metals. He eventually noticed that previously discarded metal samples were not rusting like other metals.

Based in Sheffield, the home of silver cutlery, Brearley soon began marketing his “rustless steel” to cutlery manufacturers in place of the traditional silver- or nickel-plated cutlery.

Manufacturing companies soon began researching and further developing this new grade of metal. The uses of stainless steel today go way beyond Brearley’s original stainless cutlery. Planes, trains, ships, and cars are made from it. You will find stainless steel in every kitchen and at most building sites. It is also used extensively in medical equipment.^[7]

It is hard to imagine that this essential metal was initially thrown on a laboratory scrap heap.

3 Bubble Wrap

We probably take the protective packaging in most parcels for granted. Many people enjoy popping the small air-filled pockets in the Bubble Wrap in which their parcel contents were wrapped.

But did you know that Bubble Wrap was initially meant to be a textured wallpaper?

In 1957, scientists Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes put two shower curtains through a heat-shrinking machine in an attempt to develop a textured wallpaper. The result was a sheet of plastic covered in tiny air bubbles. Their efforts to use the product as a greenhouse insulation also proved to be a failure.^[8]

In 1960, IBM was looking for a way to protect delicate computer components during transport. Fielding and Chavannes’s cushioned plastic was the perfect solution to their problem.

The usefulness of “Bubble Wrap” soon caught on and is the world’s most common packaging material today.

2 Cling Wrap

Every household has a tube of “cling wrap” in the kitchen drawer. The sticky plastic film wraps our sandwiches and covers our food to keep it fresh.

The sticky film, “Saran,” was discovered in 1933 in the Dow Chemical laboratories. Ralph Wiley was working in the lab developing dry cleaning products and discovered the substance when trying to clean used beakers.^[9]

It was originally used as a protective spray in fighter jets and in motor vehicles. It was even used to line soldiers’ boots.

Saran Wrap was introduced into households as a food wrap in 1953. Concerns about the chemicals in the film being in contact with food led to further research and the development of “safer” plastic films. This effectively wrapped up the array of plastic food packaging we use every day.

1 Safety Pin

There are hundreds of uses for the humble safety pin. Clothing pins have been with us for thousands of years. However, the pointy ends were prone to give the wearer a nasty jab.

In 1849, New York mechanic Walter Hunt was sitting in his office fiddling with a piece of wire as he tried to come up with a way to pay a $15 debt.

He found that he had successfully twisted the wire into a useful object. He could see how the item in his hands could be used as a pin. The piece of wire now had a coiled spring at the bottom. Hunt added a clasp to the top, allowing the pointy end of the safety pin to be secured at the top and preventing users from being stabbed with the sharp end of the pin.^[10]

A clever inventor, Hunt was unfortunately not a sharp business man. A few years earlier, he had invented an eye-pointed needle sewing machine. He failed to patent his invention as he feared that it would cause people to lose their jobs. His design was later copied and marketed by others.

While he did patent his safety pin invention, he sold the rights to the patent to the person to whom he owed the money.

Lesley Connor is a retired Australian newspaper editor who provides articles to online publications and her own travel blog.

Most of us probably believe maps are highly accurate, but that’s not always true. When they’re erroneous, maps can cause problems for individuals, communities, and even entire nations. Map errors have resulted in lost homes, insurance cancellations, endangerment of protected wildlife, threats to human life, a military invasion, and victory or defeat on American and European battlefields. These ten momentous map mistakes show how vital it is to have maps we can depend on.

10 French And Indian War

Before and during the American Revolutionary War, not many maps of the American continent existed. Consequently, many military maps were made in the field, often under fire, and battles might be won or lost based on their accuracy.

According to authors Richard Brown and Paul Cohen, maps sometimes even caused war. Countries involved in land disputes have backed up their claims to the disputed land with maps that didn’t clearly represent the owner of the land in question. One such map, by John Mitchell, was a contributing cause to the French and Indian War, according to Brown, “because it showed claims of the British possessions, which was one of its purposes in the first place.”

Maps made by British officers on-scene corrected misconceptions about topography and the navigability of waterways. In 1759, during the French and Indian War, Captain James Cook needed to move General James Wolfe’s troops 1,600 kilometers (1,000 mi) down the St. Lawrence River, from Louisburg, Nova Scotia, to Quebec, but the river was considered “unnavigable.” At night, Cook mapped the river, allowing the British ships to traverse an area the French thought to be impassible. As a result, Wolfe captured the city of Quebec.^[1]

9 Napoleon’s Defeat At Waterloo

Napoleon Bonaparte lost the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, in part because of a map error. According to documentarian Franck Ferrand, Napoleon aimed his artillery in the wrong direction, far short of the British, Dutch, and Prussian lines. Napoleon relied on an inaccurate map when planning his strategy for the battle, which explains why he didn’t know the lay of the land and became disoriented on the battlefield. According to Ferrand, “It is certainly one of the factors that led to his defeat.”

Due to a printing error, the map showed a strategic site, the Mont-Saint-Jean farm, 1 kilometer (0.6 mi) from its true position, which was the range of Napoleon’s misdirected guns. It also showed a nonexistent bend in a road, according to Belgian illustrator and historian Bernard Coppens, who found the bloodstained map at a Brussels military museum.^[2]

8 Fatal Bombing Mishap

In July 2006, the Israeli military duplicated a map for a bombing run against a target in Southern Lebanon. An error on the copy of the map identified a United Nations post as a Hezbollah position. As a result, four international observers were killed. Israeli officials expressed their “deepest condolences and sincere regret.”

Mark Regev, Israel’s foreign ministry spokesman, acknowledged that “a mishap on the Israeli side” during the copying of the maps resulted in the failure to correctly identify the UN post’s position, leading to the calamity. The observers, who were from China, Austria, Finland, and Canada, were killed by a precision-guided bomb on July 26. The Hezbollah positions were 180 meters (590 ft) from the UN building.^[3]

7 Nicaraguan Invasion

In November 2010, Nicaraguan troops led by former Sandinista guerrilla commander Eden Pastora crossed the San Juan River near the Caribbean coast. Invading Costa Rica, their neighbor to the south, the soldiers planted their country’s flag in the soil of Costa Rica’s Calero Island, which is located in an area claimed by both nations. Google Maps almost decided the issue by placing Calero Island inside Nicaragua’s border. “See the satellite photo on Google, and there you see the border,” Pastora said. Costa Rica has no army, but it sent security forces to support the 150 agents already in the area.^[4]

The dispute was solved judicially, rather than militarily, when the United Nations’ International Court of Justice ruled that the island, which measures 3 square kilometers (1.2 mi²), and its wetlands should be ceded to Costa Rica, since it has sovereignty over the area. The court also took Nicaragua to task “for violating Costa Rica’s right to navigation in the waters” along the countries’ joint border. Although the international court is powerless to enforce its judgments, both countries must agree to its ruling before their case will be heard by the tribunal. Nicaragua’s deputy foreign minister Cesar Vega said Nicaragua would “abide by the verdict.”

6 Grounded Minesweeper

According to the United States Navy, its minesweeper USS Guardian ran aground on a Philippines reef because of an error on a navigational chart. The ship’s January 16, 2013, collision damaged the Tubbataha Reef, which is located in a protected area and is home to “one of the most biologically diverse areas in the Coral Triangle.” The Philippines government demanded an investigation of the incident to determine whether the US violated Philippines or international laws.^[5]

It was ultimately found that the US Navy damaged 2,345 square meters (25,241 ft²) of the coral reef, and the US paid $2 million in compensation and helped the Philippine Coast Guard to upgrade its station at Tubbataha. The Philippines said that the money will help to rehabilitate and protect the reef as well as enhance monitoring of the area to prevent any similar incidents from occurring. The Guardian‘s captain and other officers were faulted for the incident because they failed to adhere to standard navigation procedures when the minesweeper ran aground.

5 Stranded Drivers

Following Apple Maps directions, Australian motorists found themselves stranded in remote Murray-Sunset National Park. The drivers’ destination was Mildura, 72 kilometers (45 mi) away. In December 2012, police issued a warning to travelers not to rely on the application. Using the app, they cautioned, could be “life-threatening.”

The official Australian Gazetteer shared responsibility for the map error, because its list of place names and coordinates, which Apple Maps uses as a reference, has two Milduras. The first is the actual town (purple pin above), and the second is a point located in the middle of the remote national park (red pin). Apple Maps understood the latter to be the former, and the app’s directions were based on this misunderstanding. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook admitted to the mistake and promised to correct it.^[6]

4 International Territory Claim

For more than a century, Canada’s official maps have erroneously included part of the North Pole area as its own territory. The claim conflicts with international law, which states that nations with territory near the Arctic Circle can only claim 370 kilometers (200 nautical miles) of ocean off their northern coasts as their own waters. Anything beyond that distance is legally international waters.

Canada’s claim arose from the old-fashioned “sector theory,” in which the Arctic Ocean was divided into triangular slices, with the pole as their meeting point in the center. The theory was never accepted as Canada’s official position on the matter. The old maps’ mistake increases the territory of Canada by 200,000 square kilometers (77,000 mi²), almost all of which is ocean. This additional area is roughly the size of the UK or all five Great Lakes.

In December 2013, perhaps inspired by the sector maps’ mistake, Canadian officials decided to submit a claim of sovereignty over the entire North Pole and its wealth of natural resources, including oil. The claim would enlarge Canada’s territory by 1.2 million square kilometers (463,00 mi²), or about the size of Alberta and Saskatchewan combined. A subsequent claim would expand its territory even further. Before the claim can be submitted, however, Canada must map the area. Even if the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf agrees with Canada’s claim, its decision is nonbinding and would merely open negotiations between countries with their own territorial claims in the Arctic. Such disputes could take years to resolve.^[7]

3 Wildlife Endangerment

Mapping mistakes that have persisted from the late 20th century into the 21st century continue to endanger African wildlife in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Luama Katanga Reserve. As a result of the errors, the reserve’s boundaries were shifted 50 kilometers (31 mi) to the west. Now, plants and animals that should be protected could be at risk, as mining, agricultural, cattle grazing, and forest clearing operations move in. “The moral of this story is that keeping track of parks—and especially getting maps and boundaries correct—matters hugely for biodiversity,” said James Deutsch, WCS Vice President of Conservation Strategy.

A newly documented species of vegetation, Dorstenia luamensis, a hanging, fern-like plant, is among the flora in the 230,000-hectare reserve, which is also home to 1,400 chimpanzees, whose lives would be threatened should the clearing of forests destroy their habitat. Deutsch urged that the maps be corrected and the reserve protected.^[8]

2 Flood Insurance Refusal

One of the responsibilities of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA’s) Flood Map Service Center is to serve as the “official public source for flood hazard information produced in support of the National Flood Insurance Program.” Its flood maps are important for three reasons: First, they’re intended to save lives by assessing an area’s flood risk and recommending relocation if need be. Second, they assist communities with managing their flood plans. Third, they’re used by insurance companies to determine homeowners’ flood insurance rates.

The mission and the objectives of FEMA’s flood protection program appear to be in jeopardy in some cases, due to map mistakes. These errors have created a dilemma for the city of Rochester, Massachusetts. Despite the new FEMA flood plain maps’ numerous errors, Rochester must adopt them to be eligible for federal flood insurance assistance. If the city refuses to accept the mistaken maps, many homeowners could end up losing their insurance.

FEMA’s latest maps of the area are based on older, erroneous maps, to which the new maps add mistakes of their own. Conservation agent Laurell Farinon said that some of the maps’ data make no sense. Rochester Planning Board member Ben Bailey agreed that the maps are “fundamentally flawed.” One of their errors affects him personally: “The line that goes through my property goes up a 20-foot hill and back down again. You don’t have to be an engineer to see that this is inaccurate.” As a result of the error, his insurance company refused to offer him homeowner’s insurance. Massachusetts forbids insurance companies to raise their rates, so Bailey couldn’t get insurance by paying more.

The appeals period has ended, so homeowners are left with two options: Do without insurance or pay engineers to reevaluate their property. And it’s not only homeowners who suffer from FEMA’s map errors. The maps are also used by the Planning Board, the Conservation Commission, and building inspectors. FEMA assumes their maps are correct, placing the burden of proving them wrong on the landowners.^[9]

1 Demolition Of House

It wasn’t their fault they tore down the wrong house, a demolition team argued in 2016. The blame lay with Google Maps. The house numbers were identical, but the duplexes were located on different streets. To explain the mistake, an employee of the demolition firm e-mailed a homeowner a copy of a Google Maps photo showing an arrow pointing to the demolished house she owned with another person. The map’s arrow pointed at the duplex on 7601 Calypso Drive, Rowlett, Texas—but identified its address as 7601 Cousteau Drive. The firm was supposed to demolish the duplex on Cousteau.^[10]

Despite the company’s contention that Google is at fault, Gerry Beyer, a law professor at Texas Tech University, is doubtful. “My gut reaction is that Google would not be liable,” he said, because Google’s terms of service clearly state that users are responsible for the actions they take based on Google Maps.

Gary Pullman, an instructor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, lives south of Area 51, which, according to his family and friends, explains “a lot.” His 2016 urban fantasy novel, A Whole World Full of Hurt, available on Amazon.com, was published by The Wild Rose Press.

All of us have made a small mistake at one time or another, and most of the time it doesn’t turn into anything more than a minor problem. For this reason, the average person doesn’t generally worry too much about paying hyper-focus to detail, at least in most situations. However, there are some cases where a mistake can cause more than just a small problem. Sometimes, one minor error or one single lapse in judgment can cost billions, or lead to the death of thousands. Or, in some cases, potentially both.

10. Casually Using The N-Word on A Conference Call Has Serious Consequences 

Papa John Schnatter has become a case study in how not to talk at a conference call, to avoid marketing disasters. Back in May of 2018, he had been clarifying some earlier comments he made blaming the NFL for not doing enough about the protests regarding the national anthem when he decided to casually throw out the n-word — along with some other off-the-cuff comments many found offensive. Schnatter tried to explain that he was trying to show his antipathy towards racism, and not that he was being racist, but the damage was done. 

While Schnatter may have been worried about lost pizza sales due to decreased NFL viewership, his company soon had a much bigger problem. In July, the first month after the news of what he had said sunk in, sales in Papa John’s stores dropped 10.5%. To make matters worse, the company projected that this would likely be consistent for at least the rest of the fiscal year. As for Schnatter, while he still has a lot of stock in the company, and no one can just take that away from him, the controversy ended with him losing all the power he once had within his own company. 

9. A Small Accounting Error Caused A $4 Billion Discrepancy For Bank Of America 

Back in 2014, Bank of America found itself in hot water with regulators and was forced to suspend some payout plans while they sorted things out. You see, it turns out that for five years, Bank of America had been accumulating losses, and had not been reporting them to the regulatory authorities. This was no small amount either: It turned out that Bank of America had $4 billion of unreported losses, which was something they could handle but was also a very significant sum of money to lose. 

The excuse from Bank of America? Their accountants just got confused and missed it, simple as that. So, how did they manage to lose this much money until an internal review found it five years later? Well, it gets into some fairly complicated financial rules that even accountants don’t necessarily like dealing with, but the short version involves their acquisition of the troubled Merril Lynch. When they did this, they took on their debt, but they did not need to report it as a loss, as it was considered unrealized debt — at least until they sold it. The problem is they started selling the debt, finally realizing their losses, and their accountants didn’t realize they needed to report it. 

8. The Japanese Stock Market Had To Cancel $6 Billion In Transactions Due To A Small Error 

The Japanese Stock Exchange is the second biggest in the world, and Japan is known for having excellent technology as far as most of the world is concerned. So it may be a surprise to some to know that Japan has had multiple instances where their antiquated stock exchange system cost people gigantic sums of money. However, the truth is among stock traders and technology experts, the issues that Japan has had in the past with its stock exchange system are well known, and they have been under fire for not having properly updated systems as far back as the early 2000s when some of the worst errors began. 

In 2004, the first major cracks started to show when a single error caused a loss of $330 million. The error was a mistake by a clerk entering a number by hand into the system for an ew stock that was coming out, marking it as selling for a dollar a share, instead of several thousand dollars per share. Then, in 2014, a fat finger error by a broker who accidentally made 42 transactions and then immediately canceled them, caused such a mess the Japanese stock exchange had to cancel over $6 billion worth of transactions. 

7. You Should Be Careful With Translations When Deciding To Nuke People 

Mistranslations can create some of the worst misunderstandings in the world, but there has never been a greater tragedy caused by mistranslation than when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on two populated cities because of a double translation failure. It all started near the end of the war when the Allies sent terms of surrender to Japan, and then waited hopefully for a reply that would not mean more war. If the Japanese did not comply, they were prepared for very aggressive measures to ensure they did so. 

The Japanese government needed some time to decide, as the terms were strict and unconditional, but reporters wanted to know where things stood. A reporter asked the Japanese premier how he felt about the proposed terms, and he used the Japanese word Mokusatsu, trying to give the age-old response of “no comment.” Unfortunately, the word he chose was not a great choice, as it can mean silence, but it can also mean “to contemptuously ignore.” The reporter made the mistake worse by assuming the rude version and not even asking for clarification. She took her bad translation back to America with the results we all know too well. The story is now taught in some schools as a way to teach kids about miscommunication.  

6. Missing A Hyphen Can Have Tragic Consequences When Working With Rockets 

Have you ever been programming and forgot a single parenthesis and spent hours tracking it down? Or perhaps you sew, and once spent hours trying to find that one stitch that was out of place. Tiny little mistakes in life can be irritating, and make us spend hours of our valuable time doing something stupid and mostly pointless trying to fix or even find the problem. However, no matter how many times we have made a small mistake that caused us an inconvenience — or perhaps even cost our workplace money — most of us can rest easy knowing we never caused $80 million worth of damage because we missed a single hyphen. 

The incident we are referring to is the loss of Mariner 1, the United States’ first major attempt at an unmanned rocket to explore Venus. It was in the early days of space exploration, back in 1962, which meant eighty million dollars was worth closer to $640 million today. Mariner 1 went up, the misplaced hyphen caused its guidance systems to fail, and they were forced to abort the mission by destroying the rocket. In the end, over half a billion dollars was launched into the air, and it didn’t even last five minutes. 

5. If Not For A Single Mistake, The Crossing Of The Delaware May Have Failed 

The Crossing of the Delaware was one of the key moments in the American Revolution and has been immortalized forever in an iconic painting we all know. On Christmas night, Washington and his men snuck across using three different crossings and surprised the Hessian troops on the other side. Many like to talk about how the element of surprise was what won them the day, and there are even claims the Hessians were drunk from Christmas, although there is no proof of this. The truth, however, is that while Washington did his best to keep it secret, spies found out and warned the Hessian commander. 

The commander, General Rall, simply did not take Washington, or his band of men seriously. He thought of them as little more than a rabble, that his men could take without a fuss, and did not believe he was dealing with a real threat. Then on the day of, he received more messages from spies that an attack was imminent, but refused to fortify defenses or amp up security patrols. Instead, he simply told the spies they would meet the Americans with bayonets. In the end, one man’s casual arrogance led to one of the greatest defeats in military history. 

4. People Think We Avoided Y2K, But The Labor Cost To Save The World Was Massive 

Back at the turn of the millennium, many people were worried about Y2K, and how it might cause severe consequences or even the end of the world. Those who thought the world was going to end were a bit over the top, but the truth was that we were far closer to disaster than most people realized, and it was a very serious issue. While it was unlikely to cause a nuclear weapon to accidentally launch or something tragically similar, there was a very good chance that financial systems and other computer systems could suffer huge errors and glitches that had the potential to cause untold economic harm. 

The programmers who had caused the issue in the first place simply never thought their programs would be used decades later, and had given no thought to the mess they created for future generations. Thus, one of the greatest concerted efforts in modern human history, or perhaps human history as a whole, began. Programmers worked around the clock, manually switching out line of code after line of code, doing a tedious but necessary task to prevent disaster. Fortunately, they did manage to switch out the code in time, but that doesn’t mean the whole mess wasn’t costly. The labor costs to manually switch out all the code in time have been estimated at $100 billion. 

3. The Bay Of Pigs: Time Zones Are Important For Invasion Planning 

April 17, 1961, is a day that lives on in infamy as the day of the biggest screwup the CIA ever had and as something they dubbed a “perfect failure”. The plan was to take out Castro’s air fleet with a quick bomber strike, and then land an amphibious force of roughly 1,400 Cuban exiles. These men could be later supported with additional air support and the cover of a smaller attack on the other side of the island. Unfortunately, with a complex plan, there are more points of potential failure, and this became very apparent when the operation began. 

Among many mistakes, things went badly wrong just as the mission began. The bomber strike failed to destroy all of Castro’s bombers, leaving him with six, and plenty of air support. Then, the amphibious force suffered problems with unexpected coral reefs when landing. Things went from bad to worse, when Castro’s air support started tearing them apart, so they asked for backup air cover. The day may still have been won, but the air support arrived an hour late because of a misunderstanding of the time zones between Cuba and Nicaragua. To add insult to injury, the late-arriving air support had to fight alone and was easily destroyed. 

2. Forgetting To Convert Units Has Dire Consequences In Space 

In 1999, after 10 months of travel through space and countless expensive man-hours spent keeping an eye on its progress, the Mars Climate Orbiter reached its destination. It should have been a super happy day, but instead of a time of celebration at NASA, it became a day of loss and frustration. The Mars Climate Orbiter was given instructions for landing, and instead of landing properly, it crashed into the surface of Mars. So how did NASA lose a $200 million orbiter and all those man-hours? 

Well, the investigation found that there had been some confusion between NASA, and Lockheed Martin, who were both working on the orbiter. NASA was working with metric units, while Lockheed Martin was using American units for their data, and neither realized what the other was doing. This meant that on the day the Orbiter was supposed to land, the instructions they gave it with data from Lockheed Martin were not converted from the American units Lockheed Martin had used. This simple miscommunication and failure to convert units led to an expensive orbiter completely failing to do what it needed to do at the most crucial moment. 

1. The Most Expensive O-Ring Mishap In History 

On January 28, 1985, it was a colder than normal morning at Florida’s Cap Canaveral, but no one was bothered by the cold because excitement was in the air. The Space Shuttle Challenger was about to launch, and it was going to be broadcast live on TV for the whole world to see. Many schools across the United States had kids watching in the classroom as it was a huge educational event. Teachers also got to showcase one of their own, as a teacher was going up on the shuttle to inspire the public. Then, just 73 seconds after launch, tragedy occurred and the shuttle disintegrated on live television — killing all inside. 

An investigation was launched, and it was discovered that one o-ring acquired a fault due to the cold temperatures that morning. Whether the blame was mainly those at the top who felt under pressure to launch on time, or partly due to engineers who were afraid to voice their concerns has been picked over every which way over the years and there are various popular viewpoints. However, what is clear is that the United States lost a 3.2 billion dollar shuttle, traumatized a generation, and lost eight lives, including a school teacher and seven astronauts.

In medical parlance, “never events” are medical errors that should never happen. However, as we are about to find out, they do happen more than doctors would probably like to admit.

As of 2011, 29 incidents are classified as never events. They include but are not limited to patients falling off hospital beds, doctors using the wrong procedures for treatment, doctors forgetting surgical equipment in the bodies of patients, and doctors performing surgeries on the wrong patients.

Here, we will focus on never events that happened during surgery.

10 17-Year-Old Gets Wrong Heart And Lungs During Transplant

In 2003, 17-year-old Jesica Santillan experienced what should be the worst never event incident that has ever happened. Three years earlier, she had been smuggled into the US by her parents, who wanted her to get medical treatment for her failing heart and lungs. Philanthropist Mack Mahoney read about her story in a newspaper and footed her medical bills for surgery at Duke University Hospital.

Santillan underwent the surgery on February 7, 2003. But it only worsened her situation because the doctors used organs from a donor with the wrong blood type. The donor had blood type A while Santillan had blood type O. They are incompatible.

Santillan’s body rejected the organs as she suffered a series of seizures and ended up on life support. Two weeks later, she underwent a second surgery. This time, the organs were of a compatible blood type. Although they worked well, it was too late. Santillan had suffered irreparable brain damage and was put on life support for some time. Eventually, she was taken off it.

At the time of her death, there were about 200 people in the US requiring donors for a heart-lung transplant. Santillan was supposed to be at the end of that list. But she was allowed to go to the front of the line because her situation was dire.

The medical error resulted in two sets of organs wasted. It also reduced the chances of survival for others awaiting surgery because it deprived them of the much-needed organs.^[1]

9 83-Year-Old Woman Undergoes Heart Surgery For A Respiratory Infection

Staff at Mediclinic Kimberley Hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa, committed a never event after they made an 83-year-old woman undergo a heart surgery intended for another patient. The woman was Rita du Plessis, and she was at the hospital to have a respiratory infection treated.

Du Plessis and another patient requiring heart surgery had the same physician. Their doctor told a surgeon to take the other patient into the operation theater, but the surgeon mixed up the names and took du Plessis instead. After she underwent the heart surgery, her family was even contacted and told that it had been a success.

Staffers only realized their error after the physician, who had been looking for du Plessis, informed them that they had operated on the wrong patient. The physician later called du Plessis’s family to explain the situation and apologize. The hospital did not charge her for the surgery.^[2]

8 Woman Loses Breast To Cancer She Didn’t Have

In April 2015, 49-year-old Eduvigis Rodriguez underwent surgery for an aggressive cancer lump in her left breast. The diseased breast was removed, and she was fine—at least until medics realized during post-surgery tests on the amputated breast that Rodriguez didn’t have cancer. The supposedly cancerous lump was caused by sclerosing adenosis, the benign growth of extra tissue in the breast.

The mistaken diagnosis of cancer was made at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital after a biopsy. But they referred Rodriguez for surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. However, this doesn’t mean that the staff at Lenox Hill was completely innocent.^[3]

Per hospital rules, Lenox Hill staff was supposed to run tests to confirm the initial diagnosis. But they didn’t do it even though Dr. Magdi Bebawi, who performed the surgery, signed paperwork claiming that they had. After the initial surgery, Rodriguez underwent reconstructive breast surgery. According to court records, she also suffered a surgical hernia and a pulmonary embolism as a result of the unnecessary mastectomy.

7 Wrong Patient Undergoes Brain Surgery

In 2018, Kenyatta National Hospital in Kenya made the news after a patient underwent a brain surgery intended for another patient. Both men were wheeled into the hospital unconscious and kept in the same ward. However, they somehow ended up with each other’s identification tag and the wrong one ended up in the operating theater.

The patient who required surgery had a blood clot in his brain, while the other simply had a swollen head. Surgeons wheeled the patient with the swollen head into the operating theater. But they didn’t realize that they had the wrong man until two hours later when they didn’t find a blood clot in the brain.^[4]

Hospital authorities suspended the neurosurgeon, anesthetist, and two nurses who were involved with the surgery. In a twist of fate, the patient who was supposed to have the surgery no longer needed it as his situation was already improving.

6 Elderly Woman Dies After Receiving Brain Surgery For A Jaw Displacement

The staff at Oakwood Hospital in Michigan found themselves in hot water after they made 81-year-old Bimla Nayyar undergo a brain surgery she didn’t need. The water got even hotter after Nayyar slipped into unconsciousness and died 60 days later.

Nayyar was admitted to Oakwood Hospital in January 2012 for a displaced jaw. The treatment was supposed to be an easy one until a CT scan revealed that she was bleeding in the brain. Although the scan actually belonged to another patient, the hospital staff thought it was Nayyar’s and quickly planned an emergency surgery.

In the operating theater, five holes were made in Nayyar’s head before the right side of her skull was sawed open. Doctors only realized their error after they couldn’t find any evidence of bleeding in her brain. They informed her family of the error but didn’t inform them of its severity.^[5]

Nayyar never regained consciousness after the surgery and remained on life support for 60 days until the ventilator was switched off on March 11, 2012. Her family filed a lawsuit and was awarded $21 million.

5 Doctor Amputates Wrong Leg During Surgery And Another Patient’s Toe Without Permission

In February 1995, Dr. Rolando R. Sanchez found himself in trouble after he amputated the healthy leg of 52-year-old Willie King instead of the other diseased leg. Sanchez was already cutting the wrong leg when a nurse looked through the patient’s file and started crying. It was then that Sanchez was informed that he had been working on the wrong leg.

Sanchez denied responsibility for the error and shifted it to other staff members involved in the surgery. The blackboard in the operating room listed the wrong leg for amputation. So did the operating room schedule and the hospital computer.^[6]

The wrong leg had also been prepared for surgery prior to the doctor’s arrival. Sanchez added that he didn’t realize that he was cutting the wrong leg because it was also diseased and might have needed to be removed in the future.

Sanchez’s license was suspended in July 1995 after he botched a second surgery. This time, he amputated the toe of Mildred Shuler without her consent. Shuler was undergoing surgery to remove diseased tissue in her right foot when, according to the doctor, a diseased bone “popped.” He decided to remove it to prevent an infection.

4 Healthy Patient Loses A Healthy Kidney During Surgery He Didn’t Need

An unnamed patient at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, was left with one kidney after doctors mistook him for someone else. The real patient, whose CT scan revealed the presence of a tumor on his kidney, was supposed to undergo surgery to remove it.

However, the patient with the healthy kidney was somehow wheeled into surgery instead. The error was discovered after post-surgery tests revealed that the excised kidney was healthy.^[7]

The hospital staff was blamed for the incident as they did not follow proper identification protocols. While both patients had the same name, which was the cause of the confusion, they had different ages. If the staff had paid more attention, they would have realized that they had the wrong man.

3 Healthy One-Day-Old Boy Mistakenly Gets A Frenulectomy

The University Medical Center in Lebanon, Tennessee, got its fair share of medical never events after a one-day-old baby named Nate underwent a tongue-clipping surgery (frenulectomy) he didn’t need. This surgery removes the tissue connecting the tongue to the floor of the mouth.

A surgeon had specifically sent for baby Nate, and a nurse had gone to take him from his mother, Jennifer Melton. Jennifer didn’t ask questions because she assumed that Nate was being taken for a regular postnatal checkup. She only realized that Nate had undergone surgery when the nurse started educating her about the benefits of the procedure.^[8]

Jennifer checked whether the baby given to her was really Nate because she knew that he was healthy and didn’t require surgery. The nurse later confirmed the details and realized that the pediatrician had operated on the wrong baby. The doctor apologized for the mix-up, but Jennifer called her lawyers.

2 Doctor Removes Woman’s Reproductive Organs Instead Of Appendix

In March 2015, an unnamed woman living in the UK went to a hospital managed by the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals Trust and complained of abdominal pain. Tests revealed that she had appendicitis, and she was scheduled for surgery to have her appendix removed.

However, the surgeon removed an ovary and fallopian tube instead. The surgeon responsible for the error passed it off as a minor mistake and blamed it on poor vision. He added that the wormlike look of the appendix and fallopian tube confused him.

UK medical authorities didn’t agree. This was the third botched surgery for this doctor within two years. In September 2013, he had removed some fat from a patient who also needed an appendectomy. The patient was in extreme pain until he underwent another surgery a month later.

In another patient, the doctor removed a skin tag instead of a cyst. The doctor apologized for the mistakes, but he was banned from treating more patients.^[9]

1 Doctor Removes Wrong Testicle During Surgery

In 2013, Steven Hanes was scheduled for surgery at J.C. Blair Memorial Hospital in Pennsylvania to remove a painful and damaged right testicle. He underwent the surgery, but the doctor mistakenly excised the left testicle instead.^[10]

Dr. Valley Spencer Long claimed that he mistook Hanes’s right testicle for the left one because the two testicles had somehow switched positions. Hanes took legal action against the surgeon and the hospital and was awarded $870,000.

It is always fun catching movie mistakes. There’s just so much satisfaction when you get to turn to your friend with an impish, self-satisfied grin and a rhetorical, “Did you catch that?” And there are a gosh darn lot of mistakes to find. Movie productions are massive undertakings that require thousands of moving parts to coordinate, and unfortunately for error correction, most of those pieces are human. 

Objects and people are left in shots, sets are rearranged and break continuity, shots are edited in awkward orders, and sometimes extras just hit their heads on doors. The ways in which movies can mess up are endless. Whether they’re tiny fumbles hidden in corners or major plot points overlooked, it’s fun to put on those metaphorical Spock ears, become overly analytical and pedantic, and mock them relentlessly. 

With that goal in mind, here are ten of the most glaring movie mistakes ever put on film.

10 Stormtrooper Head-Bonk

It’s the absolute height of tension. Luke and Han have infiltrated the Death Star, freed Leia from her cell, and escaped—straight into the trash compactor. The walls are closing in, the dianoga is out for Skywalker blood, and the trio’s only possible savior, C3PO, isn’t answering his comm. Audiences hold their breath as a shot of ‘3PO’s abandoned mic pans over to a squad of stormtroopers finally breaching the droids’ hiding place… and one of the idiots smacks his head on the blast door.

It is wildly noticeable in the shot and is even accompanied by an attention-grabbing sound effect. The story goes that George Lucas didn’t notice the gaffe until after the film’s release, and so decided to poke fun at the moment (and himself) by highlighting it with an audible thunk in the 2004 DVD rerelease. The wackiness of the moment really undercuts the ‘Supreme Ordeal’ (as Lucas’s favorite Joseph Campbell would put it) of our heroes’ peril.

9 Holes Before Bullets

Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 masterpiece “Pulp Fiction” (which somehow lost Best Picture to “Forrest Gump”) is a complicated story. The narrative consists of three separate but interweaving storylines told in seven distinct segments presented in a nonlinear order. The fact that there aren’t 50 continuity mistakes we can point to is already impressive. There is one, however, that is both noticeable and vexing: the magic bullet holes.

In the penultimate segment, The Bonnie Situation, Jules and Vincent kill Brett in his apartment. One of Brett’s friends busts out of his bathroom hiding place and fires six shots at the two hitmen, and every bullet misses. The wall bears the six holes which, to Jules, prove that a miracle occurred. And indeed it did, as—if you rewind the scene and look closely—the bullet holes were already in the wall by the time Jules and Vincent got to the apartment.

8 Spider-Man’s Lamp

In Sam Raimi’s 2002 “Spider-Man” movie, Tobey Maguire plays the titular wall-crawler and, naturally, has to act out the obligatory superpower-discovery sequence. Peter discovers that he no longer needs glasses, he has a new, jacked physique, can stick to anything, and can shoot webs. He shoots them all over his bedroom (is the puberty metaphor becoming obvious yet?), including at a lamp on his dresser, which he yanks backward and smashes. The noise causes Aunt May to check on Pete, and one shot later…

The lamp is back together and sitting atop the dresser again. Normally, ‘lamp status’ is not a criterion for mockery, but this particular lamp was the main object focus of the scene. The whole point is that the lamp is smashed. That’s how we see Peter’s lack of webbing control, which causes May to check on him at all.

7 Two Ant-Men

Speaking of Marvel’s leading insect-men, Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man is one of the twenty-million superheroes to appear in the final battle of “Avengers: Endgame.” Emerging from the wreckage of Avengers Headquarters, Ant-Man giant-ifies himself and joins the line of heroes as they pose and flex. In the brawl, he uses his size to squash enemies before shrinking back to regular size in order to fix his van/time machine…

Except that he’s shown just a few moments later still on the battlefield and still stories tall. Within just a minute of shots, we’re shown two different Ant-Men fighting at the same time—one giant Ant-Man wrestling with space-eels and one regular-sized Ant-Man hot-wiring an old van. All-in-all, it’s understandable, given the sheer number of CGI combatants the filmmakers had to manage.

6 Old Scottish Battle-Car

There are a number of visible mistakes in 1995’s “Braveheart,” like the random crew member in a baseball cap that can be seen amongst the more period-appropriate, costumed extras. One goof is a bit bigger. Like the size of a car.

In the middle of the pivotal scene where Mel Gibson’s William Wallace leads his ragtag band of Scots into battle with the English, a white car sits in the frame just when the English cavalry is charging. It’s parked a few meters behind the charging cavalry and happens to sit directly in the negative space left by the galloping horses. Noticing it definitely dampens the historicity of the moment.

5 To Help a Raptor

1993 saw the release of “Jurassic Park,” and with it, the transformation of a mediocre book into a stellar movie. Though 28 years old at the time of this writing, the practical effects in the movie still hold up today. They even surpass much of the CGI content of the past few years. But to work properly, practical effects require a helping hand—in this case, literally.

As the two raptors “figure out how to open doors” (way to jinx it, Ellie) and enter the kitchen hiding place of the two children, a hand enters the shot, clearly pushing a raptor forward and holding it up. You can see the hand reach up and tenderly support the raptor’s bottom, which would be sweet if not for the broken immersion and seemingly impending child death.

4 “Your Mother’s Eyes”

The “Harry Potter” movies are as full of mistakes as they are magic, which is understandable given that there are eight of them and each was a giant, on location, tentpole production. And for every production goof, there are just as many continuity and cosmology mistakes written into the books themselves (looking at you, time-turner). But the most glaring in the films is the repeated plot point of Harry having ‘his mother’s eyes,’ despite that being demonstrably untrue.

Throughout the films, a half-dozen major characters tell Harry that he has his mother’s eyes. The implication is that they grew so fond and protective of him so quickly because his eyes reminded them of Lily. Except when we see young Lily in a flashback, she has dark brown eyes—as far removed from Harry’s light blue eyes as possible. Strangely, this came after another actress had already played Lily, and actually had the correct, blue eyes.

3 What Octopus?

The Goonies is a wonderful bit of 80s nostalgia, a fun action-adventure romp, and a complete mess of a screenplay. That’s why it’s no surprise that it contains one of the most glaring movie mistakes in history. At the end of the film, when the Goonies tell reporters about their adventure, Data begins it all by saying, “The octopus was very scary. It was very dangerous.” The only problem is that there was no octopus in the movie.

Of course, there was an octopus, but only in a scene that was cut before the film’s theatrical release. Wading through the water in the grotto where One-Eyed Willy’s ship is moored, the young Goonies encounter a giant octopus. After a lot of screaming, the kids manage to defeat the creature by—I can’t believe a human really wrote this—forcing it to eat a tape player, the music of which drives it mad. I guess. Cutting the scene was the right choice, but leaving in Data’s line was not.

2 The Missing HedgeMaze

“The Shining” is a masterful horror film that culminates in Jack Torrance—wounded, crazy, possessed, ax-wielding Jack Torrance—chasing his son Danny through the Overlook Hotel’s famous hedge-maze. The whole scene is one giant set piece; it’s as much about the maze itself as it is about the characters. Although the maze was shown and mentioned earlier in the film, it was left out at a key moment.

Specifically the first shots of the film, all wide aerial shots of the hotel and its surrounding landscape. The helicopter shots clearly show the hotel with no hedge-maze to be seen. It’s funny that director Stanley Kubrick, who made Shelley Duvall film the infamous staircase seen 127 times until she got it right, chose to show the hedge-maze’s location and forgot to include the hedge-maze.

1 The Turtle with Two Mouths

1990’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” is outstanding and criminally overlooked when it comes to comic book movies. It is, however, chock full of mistakes. Attentive viewers can spot stunt performers in shots, stray cameras, visible wire rigs, rubber weapons, clearly missed karate strikes, and about a hundred cameos by Splinter’s puppeteer(s). But the biggest mistake of all is the now-infamous mouth in a mouth.

There are actually a few examples of this, but the most visible is when Donatello calls Raph and Leo’s hug a “Kodak moment” and cracks himself up, rearing back in laughter. As his turtle mouth opens, we see the human mouth behind it. The teeth-in-teeth image is beyond horrifying. You have to pity any kid who happened to catch that in theaters, as they might have legitimately been forced to wonder if the turtles were actually Xenomorphs.

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.

Some criminals are meticulous in their planning. They will stalk a victim and commit their nefarious deeds with a mind to how they will escape authorities and never be tied to the scene of the crime. There have been killers that actually shaved their bodies and wore clean suits ahead of time just so they would leave no evidence that they were involved. But for all the planning that some killers do ahead of time, it’s the stupid mistakes that they make afterwards that often end up being their downfall. 

10. Ted Bundy Stole a Car

During Ted Bundy’s reign of terror, the serial killer was responsible for at least 30 murders over a span of about 5 years. It’s very likely that he committed many other crimes that we’ll never know about. Bundy was known to be a charming man, and he was considered handsome as well. These were two traits that helped him gain the confidence of many of his victims. His M.O. was used as a part of the movie The Silence of the Lambs. He would approach his victims during the day, in public places, pretending to be disabled and in need of help. Seeing such a charming but helpless man lulled a lot of people into a false sense of safety. Then he would knock them unconscious and kidnap them before sexually assaulting and murdering them.

The full details of exactly what he did are widely available and also remarkably disturbing and gruesome. He had been a psychology student in University and was well-liked by other students and his professors.  He even got into law school in the early 1970s. It seems like the only reason he didn’t finish was that he was too busy committing murders. When authorities turned their eye to Bundy in 1975 after he was charged with assault and kidnapping, he left Colorado in favour of Florida and continued his crime spree. 

Bundy was initially caught because he was driving with no lights on in the early morning. When the police inspected his car, it was full of what we consider today to be a host of creepy items including a ski mask, an ice pick, and handcuffs. Unfortunately, all that they charged him with was kidnapping. He managed to escape from prison later, and then was caught again when he made an illegal turn in a stolen vehicle. Once again he managed to escape from prison, and once again he was caught in a stolen car.

Had he not chosen to steal a car for the second and third times he was caught, he might have gotten away with everything for an indefinite time.

9. Golden State Killer Left Old DNA

Tons of people get suckered into the allure of sites like Ancestry.com or 23andMe. Who wouldn’t be excited to find out that they are 11.6% Atlantean, 35.6% Scottish, and 0.4% French Canadian? If you’re a serial killer, however, then these online DNA registries could be your undoing.

Law enforcement use the site called GEDMatch to upload a DNA sample they had from the Golden State Killer left at a crime scene from the 1980s. that site is a free online database where anyone can post their genetic data that they received from a site like 23andMe or Ancestry.com. Most people use it to help find distant relatives they didn’t know about who also uploaded their DNA results. But the police used it to track down anyone who was genetically related to the Golden State killer, a serial killer who had been at large for decades. They ended up finding a few cousins.

Using the other information available to them, law enforcement was able to narrow down who the killer was based on approximate age and the location of the crimes. They subsequently caught and arrested Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. The former police officer had committed 13 murders, 50 rapes, and well over 100 burglaries between 1973 and 1986. 

The DNA that the killer has left at the scene was utterly useless to law enforcement before this. While it’s a great way to identify a suspect, you do need to match it to a suspect. Since the police had none, the DNA was like a fingerprint with no finger to match it to. But the killer’s family members had at some point in time had their DNA tested. Had it not been for the novelty of modern DNA testing, the killer might have never been caught.

8. Randy Kraft Drove Drunk

Randy Kraft was known as the Scorecard Killer among other colorful mantis the media gave him for his murder spree that lasted nearly a decade from the early ’70s into the early 1980s. He killed at least 16 young men, but it’s thought that’s the true number may get well over 50.

Kraft got the nickname Scorecard Killer after he was caught, and it was discovered that he had literally kept a kind of scorecard that was written in code referencing various aspects of his victims. Some of them included initials for the victims that he killed while others detailed the various ways he had mutilated their bodies.

Kraft had long been a suspect in the murders and had even been arrested before. Authorities were not able to make any charges stick, as there was little evidence tying him to the murders. In fact, when police did try to charge him with a murder, the Los Angeles District Attorney dismissed the request of the investigating officers because the coroner had concluded the particular victim in this case had died of accidental drowning and not murder. That was in 1975.

It would not be until 1983 after Kraft had murdered several more victims that the California Highway Patrol caught sight of him driving erratically down Interstate 5. After he performed an illegal lane change, the officers pulled him over on suspicion of drunk driving. They discovered that there was actually a dead body in the passenger seat at the time. Police uncovered a mountain of forensic evidence including blood from other victims, numerous Polaroids of victims, and the affirmation scorecard detailing his crimes.

7. Alexander Bychkov Robbed a Store

Russian serial killer Alexander Bychkov was convicted of murdering nine men. His victims were typically older, sometimes homeless men, and Bychkov is known to have cannibalized the victims.

Many of Bychkov’s crimes were committed in the same way. He would meet an older man at a bar who was either homeless or an alcoholic and invite them back to his place after a night of drinking. He would then kill them and dismember their bodies.

Bychkov caught a break in 2010 when police arrested another man for the crimes and managed to get a confession out of him. The man was mentally ill, and it’s believed the confession was coerced.

Two years later, Bychkov robbed a hardware store of several knives and about $300 worth of cash. After he was arrested, police searched his home and found a diary in which he details the life and murders. If not for the robbery, he might have been able to continue for quite a while.

6. Arthur Shawcross Returned to a Body to Have Lunch

Arthur Shawcross was known to the media as the Genesee River Killer. From 1972 until 1989, he is known to have killed at least 14 victims. He was drafted into the army to serve in Vietnam and used to boast about the horrible crimes he committed there, including beheadings and more, all of which turned out to be false since he was never in active combat.

Once he was out of the army his crime spree started with burglary and arson. He was sentenced to 22 months in prison and actually got out early after saving the life of a prison guard during a riot. The next year he killed his first victim,  a 10-year-old boy. Shortly thereafter he murdered his second victim, and eight-year-old girl and was arrested the very next day for the crime. Lawyers let him plead down to manslaughter for both murders. He was released after serving 14 years, deemed to be no longer dangerous.

In 1988, Shawcross killed again, and continued to do so for at least 11 victims. Police were able to catch him in 1990 when he was captured on camera from a surveillance helicopter parked near the body of his latest victim, eating lunch and pleasuring himself. Shawcross tried to plead insanity at his trial, but no one bought it. He was sentenced to 250 years and died in prison in 2008.

5. Jeffrey Dahmer Let His Final Would-Be Victim Use the Bathroom

One of the most famous and terrifying serial killers in modern memory, Jeffrey Dahmer’s downfall is that he decided to put some trust in one of his would-be victims. That misplaced trust saved the victim’s life, and who knows how many potential future victims as well.

From the late 70s into the early 1990s, Jeffrey Dahmer murdered, dismembered, and in some cases ate parts of 17 victims.  The full breadth of his crimes horrified the world and have been the subject of numerous documentaries and movies ever since.

Although Dahmer had experienced some near misses with law enforcement in the past, including one case in which a victim got away, and police actually brought the victim back to his home because he convinced the cops it was just a domestic dispute it wouldn’t be until 1991 when he made what ended up being a fatal mistake.

Dahmer had convinced a man named Tracy Edwards to come home with him. Once they were at Dahmer’s apartment, his intended victim was handcuffed and Dahmer explained that he wanted to take pictures of him and then eat his heart. Edwards assured Dahmer that he had no interest in running away from him and they could do whatever he wanted, but he wanted to go to the bathroom and maybe have a beer. Dahmer, for whatever reason, thought that was a good idea, so they went back to the living room together. Edwards proceeded to punch Dahmer in the face and run out the front door. 

Edwards returned to the apartment with police who discovered photographic evidence of Dahmer’s many crimes, and a severed head of the refrigerator. Dahmer ended up being sentenced to 16 life terms in prison, but only lasted a couple of years before he was murdered by other inmates in 1994. Had he not agreed to let Edwards go to the bathroom and had a beer, he might never have been caught.

4. Maury Travis Printed a Map

Maury Travis was a suspected serial killer. He was arrested for two murders and confessed to 17, although the true number is in dispute. Travis was caught after his local newspaper ran a story on the disappearance and murder of one victim which he had a problem with.

When police investigated Travis’s home, they found what was described as a torture chamber in the basement full of bondage equipment and other tools. They are also videotapes detailing his crimes. 

After the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote the article about one of his victims, Travis wrote them a letter in reply saying that he could show them where plenty more bodies were. He included a map in the letter that he printed from Expedia.com. Law enforcement was able to trace that map back to Travis’s computer and arrest him. He committed suicide in custody before he was able to stand trial.

3. Richard Kuklinski Bragged 

Some people are incapable of doing anything without telling other people about it. That’s kind of a big problem with social media. It was also an issue for Richard Kuklinski, serial killer and hitman.

Known as The Iceman, Kuklinski also had nicknames of the Devil Himself and One Man Army. Sounds like he was a scary guy, and he was convicted of five murders, though he is known to have committed numerous other crimes. Unfortunately for a Kuklinski, he just couldn’t keep his crimes to himself. 

An undercover federal agent managed to dupe Kuklinski into thinking he was a fellow criminal. The hitman spilled the beans on numerous crimes, detailing that he had laced hamburgers with cyanide and committed various other murders over the years, including how he got rid of the bodies afterwards. Lawyers tried to argue that Kuklinski was just blowing smoke when he made these statements and they weren’t real, but the problem was they matched up with real crimes. 

2. Neville Heath Signed a Hotel Registry

Leaving your ID at the scene of a crime is arguably one of the stupidest things you could do as a murderer,  possibly even more stupid would be signing your name at the scene because that actually takes extra effort to do. And that’s exactly what Neville Heath did.

Shortly after becoming engaged to a woman he just met, he hooked up with another woman and brought her back to his hotel room. Evidence discovered the next day suggested that he had tortured the woman before murdering her and leaving her in the room to be found by the house key for the next day. For whatever reason, however, he had signed the hotel registry with his real name when he checked in. 

In a baffling twist, after writing the police a letter saying that, sure it was his room but he let another guy use it, he then left town, checked into a different hotel using a fake name this time, and then murdered another woman the exact same way. He was found guilty at trial and executed by hanging in 1946. 

1. Henri Landru Bought One-Way Tickets

You can look at the way Henri Landru  was captured either as an example of the man’s over efficiency or his cheapest. In the early 1900s, Landru  was known to be a swindler of women. He would seduce lonely women out of their life savings and move on to someone else. It’s a con that still goes on today, but Landru took it a step further when he started committing murders.

Most of his victims were widows. Landru would meet them in his capacity as a furniture seller. After the women lost their husbands, they would come to him and attempt to sell some of their possessions. He would seduce them with promises that he could invest the little money they had,  before stealing it and disappearing.

He later upped his game by claiming that he was a wealthy widower in search of a woman who had also been widowed. He met numerous women this way, and while using numerous aliases he managed to convince these women to estrange themselves from their families to be with him and they were never seen again. This happened over and over until some families began to look into the disappearances of their loved ones.

Police were unable to find bodies when they began to investigate Landru,  but the man had a bad habit of keeping track of his finances in detail. This included the times that he would purchase train tickets for himself and his would-be brides. The problem was that he purchased round tickets for himself and one-way tickets for them. Not finding remains on the property of his home, neighbors pointed out that they had more than once seen thick black smoke coming from the chimney. When police searched his massive cast iron stove, they found human remains in the ashes.

Inspirational quotes about making mistakes are so ubiquitous that they fill entire books, not to mention all those stories of how inventions or other discoveries came about by accident. Well, time to look at the other side of the coin: mistakes where the brunt of the cost was borne by thousands, maybe millions of people with little to no say in the decision-making process, and who very often had to pay with their very lives. In some instances, all of humanity could have been affected by it, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.  

10. The Handcart Expedition

In 1856, the followers of Mormonism had brought 1,100 from the United Kingdom and Scandinavia to Missouri, and it was intended for them to press on to what Brigham Young declared would be Zion in Utah to escape the persecution they were experiencing in states that had been admitted into the Union at the time. As the converts were too poor to buy covered wagons or oxen to haul them, the expedition turned to hand carts. It was reasoned that not only would the alternative be cheaper, the light loads could be moved fast enough to get the new arrivals to Zion in two months. 

Young and the other organizers’ calculations were wrong in just about every way they could be. For one, they overestimated the sturdiness of the greenwood material that went into the carts, meaning that they soon had dozens of wrecks. For another, the groups were allowed to head out in August instead of the recommended May departure. En route, supplies such as blankets – which could be lifesavers – weren’t just abandoned, but actively burned to destroy the temptation to turn back for them later in the journey. No resupply areas were set up for the converts, and word was not sent forward to any existing settlements. Salt Lake City, the main population from which any sort of rescue mission could be launched, didn’t even know they were coming. 

The end result was that 210 people died from cold, starvation, and other causes on the way to Zion. Effectively, Young had inflicted five Donner Party disasters’ worth of losses on the Mormon flock. Rather than own up to it, the leaders of the church made the handcarts into a significant religious symbol and a tribute to the faith and stalwartness of their adherents, including using handcarts in reenactments for generations after.  

9. The Overruled Yamamoto War Game 

The 1942 Battle of Midway, which resulted in the destruction of four Japanese aircraft carriers, is widely marked to be the turning point in the war in the Pacific that made Japanese defeat inevitable. What certainly wasn’t inevitable was that on the afternoon of June 4, the Japanese carriers off the Aleutian Islands of Alaska would be having their planes refueled and rearmed (switching from dive bombs to torpedos, the preferred weapon against combat ships at the time) just in time for American aircraft to attack. In fact, the Japanese command had an ominous warning that this could happen. 

On May 1, the Japanese naval command for the battle convened for a war game to test contingencies for their plan to attack the Aleutian Islands. When the eventuality of the carriers being attacked without air cover was tested (the main difference between the initial test conditions and reality on June 4 being that, in reality, the planes were still on the carriers, while in the game it was postulated they would be away on their bombing mission), there was a roll of the dice to determine the damage American bombers could inflict. When the results were a grievous loss of one carrier and damaging of another, Admiral Matome Ugaki overruled the findings, not believing American bombers could do nearly that damage even if they caught the carriers with their defenses down, and no one questioned the theorizing or reevaluated the strategy. This downplaying of the crisis impacted Japanese decision-making in a way that left them sitting ducks at the crucial moment. 

8. Cuban LGBT Persecution

Even before the Cuban Revolution, homosexuality was taboo on the island nation. In the 1960s this state of affairs exacerbated, with homosexuals being arrested, losing jobs, or worst of all being sent to labor camps known as “Military Production Aid Camps” en masse. It wasn’t until 1979 that the Cuban government decriminalized homosexuality as long as it was not “publicly manifested.” 

Unusually for a man in his position, in 2010 Fidel Castro admitted it was a mistake that such horrible acts had been committed against the LGBT community of Cuba. Furthermore, he admitted that it was his fault. Some have argued that this was only part of a public relations campaign headed by his niece Mariela Castro. Nevertheless, it was an unusual effort for a former head of state in a communist country.  

7. The Traitor Secretary of War

When discussing blunders of the American Civil War, usually the focus is one single doomed attack, such as Pickett’s Charge or Marye’s Heights at the Battle of Fredericksburg. However, the thousands of deaths that those attacks caused pale in comparison to the blunder that made the war possible. That was when President James Buchanan appointed former governor of Virginia John Floyd to serve as Secretary of War in 1857. 

As Secretary of War, Floyd would send huge portions of federal arsenals to isolated locations where they could be seized without a shot being fired by newly emergent Confederate militias, allowing the seceding states to field thousands of artillery pieces even though there was hardly a cannon factory in the entire South. He went so far as to sell 10,000 rifles to a pro-Confederate militia in South Carolina in secret. If there was any doubt of where his sympathies truly lay, when the Civil War started he joined the Confederacy as a general (though considering his disastrous performance at Fort Donelson, future president Ulysses S. Grant said that joining the Confederacy was the best service he could render the Union). In short, Floyd was the one man most responsible for ensuring that 600,000 men died during the Civil War, instead of the near zero that died from the 1833 abortive secession of South Carolina.    

6. The August 24 Bombing of London

After the conquest of France, Hitler’s plans for Britain were surprisingly lenient. He intended to negotiate peace before launching his invasion of the Soviet Union (more on this later). To that end, a significant aspect of Fuhrer Directive 17 was that terror bombings would “reserve for (himself) the right to decide on terror attacks as measures of reprisal” in the interest in concentrating offensive power on the Royal Air Force and preventing the strengthening of the British support for the war. 

Instead, on August 24, Luftwaffe air crews ended up dropping bombs on London by accident, and in reprisal on August 25 RAF bombs were dropped on Berlin. As a result, necessary Luftwaffe material was wasted trying to kill civilians instead of weakening the RAF, and the resolve to end the war went away. That anonymous bomber crew accidentally provided the Allied war effort the greatest propaganda service of the war.  

5. The Potato Blight

As of 2016, the population of Ireland still hadn’t recovered from the Great Famine of 1845-1849. A million people were forced to flee the island and another million starved to death, reducing the population by a full 25%. Considering that the potato blight disease that caused this disaster was brought through mold on ships from North America, it might be the worst American export in history.  

British laws and policies were almost intentionally unhelpful. For one thing, for years there was little official intervention allowed, and exports of Irish grain to England continued. For another, an 1838 Poor Law sent those bankrupted and evicted to workhouses, naturally massively discouraging the desperate from seeking aid and leaving many communities short on workers needed for fields. Absentee landowners in England were generally reluctant to contribute to aid programs, and many primarily expanded their landholdings, feeding the suspicion that the famine was, if not deliberate on England’s part, at least not something they were too motivated to fix. 

4. The Orissa Famine 

Speaking of British policies providing ineffective countermeasures for famines, this historical catastrophe is so obscure that even the TopTenz list on famines did not include it. And yet, it cost humanity a million lives in 1866. To a significant degree, it was due to the East India Company devastating the textile industry in India’s Orissa region, leaving economies much more vulnerable to the whims of the weather and thus allowing a severe monsoon season to exact a heavier toll. 

Official imperial response was to not intervene, and especially not to regulate the prices of grain which would leave the stocks more accessible to the general population. The human toll of this decision cost many communities as much as a third of their people. The British Empire would pay a high price in time for this laissez-faire approach, as the famine was a galvanizing event in the development of Indian nationalism. 

3. Stalin’s Kiev Order

In terms of immediate loss of personnel, no single military campaign decision was as devastating for a military as Stalin’s orders regarding the defense of Kiev that began on September 7, 1941. By September 9, 1941, Field Marshal Budenny could see that the situation was hopeless and ordered an “orderly phased withdrawal” of all Soviet forces around Kiev. Joseph Stalin expressly forbade that, and in amazingly candid language ordered, “Stay and hold, and if necessary, die!” 

An estimated 600,000 Soviet soldiers would follow the second half of that order either in combat or later in prison/death camps. Of the forces arrayed, only roughly 15,000 would escape the encirclement. Later historians have claimed that the battle still arguably saved the Soviet Union because Hitler had directed tens of thousands of soldiers that otherwise would have taken Moscow to circle back to Ukraine. But there’s little reason to believe they wouldn’t have also been able to function as a holding force if they were not encircled.  

2. The Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution was a movement in China during the last 10 years of Chairman Mao Zedong’s life, wherein intellectualism and the alleged emergence of new bourgeoisie was purged from China. This largely took the form of forming paramilitary groups called Red Guards by closing down schools and having the students harass elderly adherents to traditionalist values and purely intellectual pursuits. Zedong would resort to having to send Chinese troops after Red Guard groups that he himself had made possible, and the civil war would continue until 1977 when Deng Xiaopang (who himself had been purged from power early in the revolution) took power and held office for the next 20 years. By the end of the revolution it had cost an estimated 1.5 million lives. 

Like Castro with Military Production Aid Camps, the Chinese Communist Party was willing to admit to this lethal blunder. In May 2016, Tuesday People’s Daily, the official paper of the Chinese Communist Party, announced that it would “never allow a mistake like the Cultural Revolution to happen again.” The validity of this observation was muddled by the fact that even as the statement was being published an official celebration of the revolution was held in Beijing, and many Chinese intellectuals claim the economic reforms of the purge put China in a position to become the economic powerhouse it has become today.   

1. Ethyl

TopTenz has talked about the harm that Thomas Midgley inflicted on the workers for Tetraethyl production, but that was only scratching the surface of the harm the lead supplement for gasoline, introduced in 1923, caused for the world in general. It’s hard to say just how many premature deaths, miscarriages, and ruined nervous systems it caused after it forced its very inventor to spend months recuperating. However, a 2011 California State University report distributed by the United Nations found that an estimated 1.2 million premature deaths were prevented every year by the phasing out of leaded gasoline, and roughly 125,000 miscarriages.  

Additionally, $2.4 trillion in damages were prevented, including acid rain. So perhaps it could be said that the effort to phase out leaded gasoline, spearheaded by widely blacklisted scientist Clair Patterson, was one of the most undersung efforts in human history. 

Despite the phase out as a global effort beginning in 1971, several countries remained holdouts well into the 21st Century. This was largely due to infrastructure difficulties in refitting their petroleum industries to remove lead from the chemical process. The holdout nations included Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Officially, the last nation completed its phase out in 2021. Leaded gasoline is still causing death and nervous damage directly and legally through use in small aircraft, so Thomas Midgley will likely be harming humanity for decades to come.  

Is Dustin Koski’s fantasy novel A Tale of Magic Gone Wrong the exact opposite of one of humanity’s greatest mistakes? You’ll have to read it to find out!

It’s intriguing that for all the power that our brains have, it often chooses to reflect inward and damage the mind. Please, tell me if you’ve never been drifting off to sleep when your brain snaps you back to reality to remind you of something completely embarrassing that you had done in the past. You’d be the first. We cope with these horrible memories by telling ourselves that we were young and stupid and that nobody even really remembers it like we do. All these are valid points, but sometimes they’re not. What if you’re a professional and mess up something so basic that it actually overshadows your whole career?

Two quick things before diving into this list. First, this list is meant to be lighthearted, so I’m not including any incidents that resulted in people getting hurt or killed for their failures. Secondly, my rubric for judging how much they are known for their gaffe is based on the auto-complete feature in Google. So if one of the top three search options is the person’s name and their mistake, I count it. With that said, let’s look at 10 athletes who are famous for their mistakes.

10 Bill Gramatica Celebration Injury

Bill Gramatica is a former NFL kicker drafted by the Arizona Cardinals in 2001. As a rookie, he went 16/20 in field goals and 25/25 in extra points, setting a rookie franchise record of 73 points scored. He probably could have scored more had he not famously gotten injured on December 15, 2001. After nailing a field goal, Gramatica took a running leap before making an awkward landing and falling to the ground clutching his leg. It turns out his celebratory jump ended with him tearing his ACL. The kicker is that this all happened in the first quarter on a 42-yard kick. Not really the most dramatic circumstances to warrant such a celebration.

Gramatica recovered and spent a few more years in the NFL, but his injury is still what he is most known for. To his credit, he is able to look back and laugh. In 2010, he corrected an interviewer who said he got injured from jumping. “My jump was excellent. It was my landing I needed to work on” I agree with him. If you stop the video just as he lands, it is a pretty good celebration. As a special note: due to his injury, the late, great Pat Tillman handled kickoff duties for the rest of the game.^[1]

9 Lindsey Jacobellis

The most decorated female snowboard cross athlete ever is not known for her five world championships but for her last-minute celebration that knocked her from gold to silver in the 2006 Winter Olympics. Jacobellis was almost 150 feet (46 meters) ahead of her competition, which equates to about a 3-second lead (that’s how fast they go), when she attempted a method grab on the second to last jump to add a little flare to her victory. Unfortunately, that flare caused her dreams to go up in smoke as she fell and was overtaken by Tanja Frieden, earning her quite possibly the most disappointing silver medal in history. At first, Jacobellis said the method grab was meant to stabilize her board but later owned up that she was excited and wanted to pump up the crowd.

Despite her unparalleled success at the X-Games and world championships, Jacobellis continued to struggle when it came to the 2010 and 2014 Olympics. She began to wonder if her 2006 fall was all she would be known for. Eventually, she teamed up with a mental skills coach named Denise Shull, who encouraged her to analyze, normalize, and embrace that defining moment of 2006. Whatever they did worked because, in 2022, Jacobellis won the Olympic gold she had been chasing after for years. Jacobellis may still be known for her fall, but now it is in the greater context of a redemption arc.^[2]

8 Alexander Semin Fight

In the broadest sense, there are two kinds of hockey players: the big hitters that will punish you if you touch the puck and the skill guys who score goals like I eat cookies. Suffice to say, if you’re unfamiliar with who Alexander Semin is, you’ll definitely know what kind of player he is after watching this fight against New York Ranger Marc Staal in 2009.

In an attempt to stick up for his goalie who was knocked down by Semin, Staal grabs Semin by the jersey, and they begin to tussle. Semin wriggles out of his jersey and then proceeds to… “play the drums” on Staal’s chest—as announcer Joe Benenati stated. You really have to watch this video to understand just how weird this was. And if you were wondering. Yes, this was Semin’s very first and only fight in the NHL.^[3]

7 The Cody Parkey Double Doink

With less than 10 seconds left in the 2019 NFC wildcard playoff game between the Chicago Bears and Philadelphia Eagles, the Bears set Parkey up for a 43-yard field goal. Parkey blasted the ball through the uprights for the game winner, but before the snap, Eagles coach Doug Pederson called a time-out, so the kick didn’t count. Parkey again attempted the 43-yarder only to see it ricochet off the left upright, hit the crossbar, and land in front of the field goal. The Bears lost the game and ended their season by a score of 16-15. It wasn’t really the kick that cemented the legacy of Parkey; it was more the call from NFL commentator Chris Collinsworth, “Oh my goodness… the Bears’ season’s gonna end on a double doink.”

It was those final two words that took off all over the internet. There’s just something about how double doink rolls off the tongue and how it evokes that feeling you get when you hear the fail music from The Price is Right. Although it was later revealed in the game tape that the Eagles’ defensive tackle Treyvon Hester just barely blocked the kick and caused the ball to stray off course, the damage had already been done to Parkey’s reputation. Just as a reference to how much this took off, the double doink actually has its own Wikipedia page! ^[4]

6 Patrik Stefan Missed Empty Net

It was January 2007, and the Dallas Stars were holding a 5-4 lead over the Edmonton Oilers with 12 seconds left in the game. The Oilers pulled their goalie for an extra attacker. As the Oilers went up the ice, Stefan came up with a steal and skated in all alone toward the empty net. Instead of shooting from a short distance, Stefan decided to go for the casual skate and tap into the net. But the puck hit a divot in the ice and bounced over his stick. Trying to maintain control, he fell to the ice and ended up passing it to the Oilers, who quickly transitioned and scored a goal to force overtime.

Although Dallas ended up winning the game in a shootout, this moment gained Stefan a lot of notoriety in the worst way. I think the play-by-play announcer described it best: “Oh, I thought he was gonna until he blew it! The cherry on top is that there were 12 seconds left. Had he done anything else than what he did, Dallas would not have had to go into overtime. Stefan only played 13 more games in the NHL after that. He now coaches teens in the Detroit area and often tells them after a bad shift or game, “There’s always next shift, next game. I didn’t kill somebody. It’s a game. Mistakes happen.”^[5]

5 Steven Bradbury’s Unlikely Win

Steven Bradbury is a four-time Olympic speed skater who was the first person from the southern hemisphere to win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics. He is a source of pride for Australia, yet all anyone really remembers is how he won that gold medal.

It was at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. Bradbury was in his fourth Winter Olympics and was almost 30, making him the second-oldest competitor. He managed to make the semi-finals after another racer was disqualified but recognized that he could not match up to the much quicker, younger skaters like Apolo Ohno. So Bradbury developed a strategy of hanging back from the other racers, hoping they would crash. Sure enough, that is what happened, and Bradbury took first in his semi-finals race. Bradbury was in dead last during the final race until the final corner when the frontrunners caused a pileup. Bradbury cruised by to earn Australia’s first gold medal.

After the race, Bradbury had this to say, “Obviously, I wasn’t the fastest skater. I don’t think I’ll take the medal as the minute-and-a-half of the race I actually won. I’ll take it as the last decade of the hard slog I put in.” Many American commentators were not happy with Bradbury’s win but accepted that the risk-taking behavior of the favorites was what allowed him to win. Nevertheless, Bradbury is seen as an underdog and a hero to many. His win was so impactful to Australians that he is directly referenced in the phrase “do a Bradbury,” which means to succeed in an unlikely way.^[6]

4 Pete Carroll Not Running the Ball

There’s a reason why Pete Carroll is one of the longest-tenured NFL coaches in the league today, but he is also famous for one of the most questionable play calls in the history of the sport.

In 2015, the Seattle Seahawks were going for their second Super Bowl in three years. With only 26 seconds left in the game and down 28-24 against the New England Patriots, the Seahawks found themselves less than a yard from the end zone on 2nd-and-goal. Everyone watching this game knew what was going to happen next: Beast Mode. Marshawn Lynch earned the nickname Beast Mode due to his explosive running game that shredded through defenders. To get an understanding of his power, you have to watch his legendary game-winning run against the Saints in 2010. So you’re about two feet from the goal line, and you’ve got one of the most powerful running backs in the game. No brainer, right?

That’s why the next play was so shocking. Instead of handing the ball off to Lynch, Seahawks quarterback Russel Wilson threw a pass aimed at Ricardo Lockette. The pass was intercepted by Patriots rookie Malcolm Butler. It was his first career interception. The Seahawks lost the Super Bowl, and all anyone could think about was why Lynch wasn’t carrying the ball. Fans, Seahawks players, and analysts were all second-guessing Carroll. I mean, they had a chance to take out the Brady/Belichick Patriots, and they blew it. That final play also birthed a great meme of Seahawks defender Richard Sherman looking on in shock and terror as the interception occurs.^[7]

3 Armando Galarraga’s Almost Perfect Game

The perfect game is one of the rarest feats in all of sports. For those unfamiliar, a perfect game is when a pitcher goes nine innings without letting a single batter get on base. In nearly 150 years of professional games, only 20 players have accomplished the feat. It is something special, and the Detriot Tigers’ Armando Galarraga was so close to capturing one, and many argue he did.

In a 2010 game against the Cleveland Indians, Galarraga was one out away from a perfect game. He threw a pitch to Jason Donald, who put the ball in play. Galarraga celebrated as the ball clearly beat Donald to first base, but then he shook his head and smirked. The first base umpire, Jim Joyce, called Donald safe. Just like that, Galarraga’s perfect game was ruined. Galarraga went on to win the game, but it didn’t really matter. While Joyce was adamant he made the right call during the game, he was horrified after seeing the replay.

In an amazing display of sportsmanship, Joyce reached out and spoke to Galarraga and tearfully admitted to his mistake. Galarraga responded graciously by saying, “probably feels more bad than me. Nobody’s perfect. Everybody’s human. I understand. I give the guy a lot of credit for saying, ‘I need to talk to you.’”

Since that game, Galarraga has been awarded a car, had his perfect game recognized by the governor of Michigan, and earned a medal of reasonableness from Jon Stewart. While both the player and ump will forever be remembered for this really bad call, Joyce’s humility and ability to admit his mistake, along with Galarraga’s grace and acceptance, have made this a very positive and unifying moment in baseball.^[8]

2 Shizo Kanakuri’s Long Race

Shizo Kanakuri is known in Japan as the father of the marathon. His best-known race is the marathon he ran in the 1912 Olympics, where he completed the marathon in a time of 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes, and 20 seconds. Truly a legendary effort in persistence and resiliency.

The 1912 Olympics were held in Stockholm, Sweden, which required Kanakuri to travel by boat and train for 18 days to reach the Games. Already weary from traveling, Kanakuri struggled with the local cuisine and the unexpected heat. Additionally, this was Kanakuri’s first time experiencing white nights, the phenomenon where the sun shines throughout the night. All of this led to Kanakuri spending more time recovering than actually training.

Kanakuri was unable to finish the race and unceremoniously returned to Japan out of embarrassment. The problem was that he never alerted racing officials about his withdrawal. News spread, and it became a running joke—pun intended—that somewhere in Sweden was a lost Japanese marathoner. The story persisted until 1967, when Swedish Television reached out to him with an offer to finish what he started. Kanakuri accepted and was triumphant. After completing the marathon, Kanakuri stated, “It was a long trip. Along the way, I got married, had six children and 10 grandchildren.”^[9]

1 The Butt Fumble

Okay, I’m gonna be honest with you, this whole list was made just so I could have a reason to talk about the Butt Fumble. It was Thanksgiving 2012, but we all remember it like it was yesterday. The New York Jets and New England Patriots faced off in the primetime slot. Quarterback Mark Sanchez took the snap and dropped back for a handoff but had a miscue with the running back. With the play pretty much blown, Sanchez tried to get back to the line of scrimmage to not lose any yards. He started to slide when he collided with the derriere of Jets offensive lineman Brandan Moore. This caused Sanchez to drop the ball as he fell to the ground, which was then picked up by Patriots safety Steve Gregory and returned for an easy touchdown.

This play became the defining moment of Mark Sanchez’s career. It was the perfect storm: a comically inept play resulting in the other team scoring during a nationally televised game being watched by millions and played in front of 79,000 fans. Maybe it was because everyone was woozy from all the tryptophan in the turkey, but the Butt Fumble took off. It was featured on ESPN’s “Not Top 10” list the following day and was quickly voted to the “worst of the worst” spot for 10 months straight. ESPN had to eventually retire the play because people continued to vote for it. ESPN even did a sports science segment showing that the impact of Sanchez colliding with Moore created a force of 1300 pounds. No wonder he dropped the ball.

While analysis of this hilariously bad moment is totally fascinating, it is also interesting to see how Sanchez and Moore have handled the publicity of this event. Moore definitely doesn’t find the play amusing and seems more annoyed about how much it has impacted the other accomplishments in his career. On the other hand, Sanchez seems much more accepting and laughs about it quite a bit.

In an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, Sanchez talked about how he can laugh about it, but it has frustrated him as a competitor to have that one stupid play be all anyone remembers you for. Sanchez then goes on to say that he looks at the Butt Fumble as the bad you sometimes have to take with the good. If he laments the critiques of that play, then how can he accept the accolades of his good plays? It’s a great way to look at it and a very healthy way of dealing with failure. It’s still hilarious watching him get dropped by his own teammate’s butt, though.^[10]