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Features

The most expensive typing error ever?

Nasa’s missing hyphen; the extra ‘s’ that could cost £8.8 million; and recipes for disaster

7 February 2015

9:00 AM

7 February 2015

9:00 AM

In Paul Gallico’s 1939 novel The Adventures of Hiram Holliday, the hero’s journey is set in motion by a comma. Hiram is a copy-reader on a New York morning paper, and the comma — ‘eventually known as the $500,000 comma’ — is one he inserts into a contentious article that saves his employer in a libel case.

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