The cost of a typographical error

Mariner 1

Mariner 1: NASA image

Long gone are the printers who were a last line of defense against sloppy journalism. Gone, too, are many line editors. One who survives, Peter Robins of Britain's The Spectator, writes about some expensive typos, including a missing hyphen that doomed the Mariner 1 spacecraft: "There is still no substitute for a skilled proofreader — preferably one coming to the material fresh, so that there are no previous drafts or expectations to get between them and the text."

March 3, 2015

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