This video was made possible by Brilliant.
Learn complex concepts simply for 20% off by being one of the first 200 to sign up at
brilliant.org/HAI.
Welcome to another episode of Hall as Interesting, a show about the world’s most interesting
halls.
Previously on the show we’ve covered the Palace of Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors,
the Kite Hall of Fame, and of course, the musical stylings of Hall & Oates, but today
on Hall as Interesting we’re focusing on The Royal Albert Hall, the renowned British
venue located on the northern edge of South Kensington, London.
Opened in 1871, the Royal Albert hall established itself as—wait a second, I’m sorry guys,
I think there’s been a typo.
This isn’t Hall as Interesting, the show about halls, this is Half as Interesting,
the show about things that are just interesting enough to fill about 4-5 minutes of watch-time,
plus ad.
And today, that somewhat interesting thing, is, you guessed it: tygos.
I mean, typos.
Specifically, the most printed typo in human history.
Now there have been plenty of really bad typos throughout history.
For example, a missing character in the computer code that ran the guidance system on NASA’s
1962 interplanetary probe, Mariner 1, caused the vessel to explode less than 5 minutes
after takeoff.
Even before that, in 1631, the Baker Book House in London accidentally left one consequential
word out of the 10 Commandments when they were printing Bibles, leading to the Good
Book telling its readers, “thou shalt commit adultery.”
I’m pretty sure that was not what Jesus meant when he said to love thy neighbor, but
the most printed typo of all is found on the Australian $50 note, which was printed—typo
included—46 million times before anybody realized the error.
This is that misspelled $50 note, which was unveiled in February of 2018.
On one side is David Unaipon, who was Australia’s first published indigenous author, and on
the other side is Edith Cowan, the first Australian woman to serve as a member of parliament.
The bill has a number of security features, including a transparent strip in the middle,
holographic swans, and micro prints—where text is printed in a really tiny font.
One such micro print is here, on the Edith Cowan side, in between Cowan’s portrait
and the image of the King Edward Memorial Hospital, a women’s and maternity hospital
that Cowan helped start.
It’s an excerpt from the first speech that Edith Cowan gave to the Western Australian
Parliament, and it reads, “I STAND HERE TO-DAY IN THE UNIQUE POSITION OF BEING THE
FIRST WOMAN IN AN AUSTRALIAN PARLIAMENT…IT IS A GREAT RESPONSIBILTY —TO BE THE ONLY”…wait.
Rewind time.
It is a great responsibilty?
Shouldn’t there be an “i” before that t?
The answer is yes, and that’s exactly the question that a certain anonymous Australian
had in December of 2018, two months after they had been rolled out into circulation.
This eagle-eyed Aussie sent an email to the Royal Bank of Australia, or RBA, saying basically,
“G’day mate, I noticed that yous defo spelled responsibility wrong.
Is that some sort of security feature, or what,” to which the RBA replied, “crikey.”
But it was too late—the notes were already in circulation—and so the RBA decided to
be very, very quiet about it, and actually managed to keep the typo under wraps for another
5 months, until May of 2019, when an anonymous caller dialed into an Australian radio show
and spilled the beams.
Sorry, spilled the beans.
So how did this happen?
Well, the RBA had originally provided the correct spelling to its printer, “Note Printing
Australia,” or NPA, in December of 2016, but the graphics software that the printer
used didn’t have a copy and paste option, which meant the full quote had to be retyped
by hand.
Now, copy and paste is known to create its own problems sometimes, but because the software
also didn’t have a spellcheck function, when the typo was made, there wasn’t one
of those trusty red lines underneath it to alert anyone to the error.
But let’s not just blame that one typist because the $50 note went through an internal
trial phase, inspections by the printers, the Banknote Projects department, Banknote
Quality department, plus a review phase overseen by two separate designers, aend not a single
person noticed the error which makes me feel a lot better about the time when I spelled
the name of my hall related YouTube channel wrong when signing up and then just had to
run with it.
But the question remains: with so many people reviewing the note, why didn’t anyone notice
the typo?
Well, according to a leaked internal report from the NPA, it’s probably because of something
called “isolated word recognition.”
Basically, in order to speed up reading, our brains often read words without reading each
individual letter which is why, for example, even though it looks like it was written by
the Chick-Fil-A cows, you can probably read this sentence pretty easily.
In the end, the Royal Bank of Australia decided not to take the notes out of circulation—the
misspelled bank notes are still 100% legal tender, and can be used to buy all kinds of
Australian things like boomerangs, magnet shoes, shrimp on a barbie, or maybe a dictionary,
which you can send to the NPA to make sure that they don’t ever again shirk their spellchecking
responsibilty.
I mean, responsibility.
Of course, what the 50 dollarydoo note could also buy you is months and months of learning
with Brilliant.
Brilliant can even then help you earn those dollardoos back by helping you learn the fundamentals
of certain employable skills.
For example, I hear computers are quite the thing now and Brilliant has four great courses
covering sets of skills that you need to know to start learning programming.
What I love about Brilliant is the way they have of making super-complex topics easy to
understand even for beginners.
They make scary subjects understandable and you can try Brilliant for free by signing
up at brilliant.org/HAI.
To access their full catalogue of classes, though, you can sign up for their premium
subscription for 20% off by being one of the first 200 to sign up at brilliant.org/HAI.