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.
Austria**