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. The publisher rewards him with a $1,000 bonus and a month’s paid vacation, and he sails for Europe, where he fights Nazis and rescues a princess.
In real life, sadly, publicity comes not to the Hirams of the world but to the anti-Hirams. Another one had his day in the stocks last week, when the High Court gave its judgment on what may eventually be known as the £8.8 million ‘s’.
This ‘s’ cropped up in a database search made at Companies House six years ago by a clerk who was meant to register the liquidation of a firm called Taylor & Son. Instead he applied a digital death notice to Taylor & Sons, a Welsh engineering company that had survived two world wars and was just then reorganising to deal with the aftermath of the financial crisis. Though the information at Companies House was corrected three days later, the mistake had already spread into other people’s records: Taylor & Sons’ suppliers stopped its credit, and the business went into administration.
That £8.8 million figure is the price that lawyers for the company’s former managing director put on the error. Even if it’s accepted in full, however, the ‘s’ will not be the most expensive typo in history. For starters, there is the single missing character blamed for the failure of Mariner 1, an unmanned Nasa mission bound for Venus that fizzled shortly after its launch in 1962.
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