Not "Fake news’ or Misinformation, this is unintentionally incorrect information that gets onto the Internet, almost always without a citation, then gets picked up and repeated by other internet sources until everyone believes it. But it’s still wrong.
One of the first I encountered was Sarah Palin’s “quoting” Plato as saying “Be Nice”. That didn’t sound like the pithy “Know Thyself” Plato I’d read. In a fuller form, it was quoted as “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle,” which sounds classier, but no more like Plato than the first one. I searched through the internet and finally found a site that traced it back to an obscure clergyman named John Watson (1850-1907), who wrote under the pseudonym Ian McClaren (maybe so he wouldn’t be mistaken for Sherlock Holmes’ biographer). what he actually wrote was “Be pitiful – everyone is fighting a hard battle,” which sounds even less like Plato.
Incorrect cites:
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_...ato.Quote.59D7
http://quotationsbook.com/quote/21985/
Correct cites that uncover the true author:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquo...desk/Archive/2
http://www.literaturepage.com/forum/...ic.php?t=10957
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=563991&highlight=Plato+Palin+Nice
Anyway, I’ve recently come upon a couple of other cases in the course of researching some articles.
1.) Who invented the Black Light?
If you Google this question, the answer you almost invariably get is that it was invented in 1935 by William H. Byler. Some people on the internet have used this to “prove” that some things that were thought to have used blacklights couldn’t have, because it hadn’t been invented yet.
In fact, a.) ultraviolet lights without a visible component had been around since the 19th century; b.) What is essentially the modern black light was invented by about 1910, when Robert W, Wood, the optical physicist invented “Wood Glass”, which transmitted UV light and blocked visible light. A British optical filter company invented something almost identical at about the same time. Coupled with a good source of ultraviolet – like the relatively new mercury discharge lamp, it was a great source of ultraviolet light. Wood urged the use of such UV light for secret communications during the first World War. c.) I’ve been through Byler’s papers and patents in detail. In none of them does he claim the invention of a new ultraviolet light source. In fact, in none of them would it have been appropriate to have done so.
The source of the story appears to have been Byler’s fraternity, which gave him an award for doing this about fifty years after the supposed invention, and continue to list it on their website. Byler was, in fact, a proligic inventor, even after he formally retired. He endowed scholarships and did a lot of work in optics and fluorescence, but this achievement is not one he ever claimed. I set the record straight in a piece in Optics and Photonics News last December (not available online unless you’re an OSA member)
2.) The Roman Baths of Caracalla had no roof, but instead had a series of large bronze mirrors that directed sunlight down onto the natatio, the swimming pool.
Again, if you use a search engine for this, you;'ll find plenty of references to it, mostly from “Tour Sites for Rome” or “interesting facts about antiquity” sites. But it ain’t true
I was researching the use of mirrors in the ancient world to direct sunlight into buildings. The judgment of most scholars is that, despite 19th century suggestions that the Egyptians used mirrored sunlight in their tombs to minimize soot damage, and more recent uses of the trope in video games and movies (it even has its own page at TV Tropes – Light and Mirrors Puzzle - TV Tropes ), this really wasn’t a practical way to light a room any reasonable distance from the opening. So I thought I’d look for any other, non-tomb suggestions of mirror use for lighting in the ancient world. I didn’t expect to find any, because it’s not very practical, but was surprised to find this tidbit about the Baths of Caracalla. But I was bothered once I was unable to find any actual citations to anchor it.
I finally DID find a citation – in the Wikipedia page about the Baths. But the book it cited did not actually give a reference. Noting that the original version of the book was over thirty years old, I thought I wouldn’t find any help there, but I wrote an e-mail to the author. I also e-mailed the author of the definitive book on the archaeology of the Baths.
To my surprise and delight, both e-mails were answered. The Expert wrote back that she’d never heard this rumor before, and there was absolutely o truth in it. The one who wrote the book thirty year before told me which book he’d gotten the information from. Following this lead me to another book, which lead to another, and finally the source. This was a 1951 paper on the Baths that, to make an already long story a bit shorter, apparently mistranslated a word “solearis” to mean something like "sunny’. It’s the only use of the word we have from the period, so she can be forgiven the ambiguity, but the word has nothing to do with the sun, and appears to come from a different root. In fact, several of the words in the relevant passage are unique, so that quite a bit about the interpretation of the passage has been written. The two books citing the 1951 piece, in fact, point out that the interpretation is almost certainly incorrect, but they had the unwanted effect of perpetuating the mistake to the point where it could be picked up out of context by Wikipedia (and applied to the wrong room – the passage doesn’t refer to the natation). But Wikipedia carries a lot of weight, so people accepted the congenial possibility of sunlit swimming pool in Imperial Rome. (I haven’t told Wikipedia about this yet. I intend to. My piece on this has just been submitted.)
any others? I’m not interested in deliberate misinformation, or in Internet hoaxes, but “naturally occurring” internet errors that took on a life of their own, and are now bouncing around the internet as self-proclaimed facts, but which aren’t.
