While one may not necessarily agree with your conclusions, one is forced to admit that the train of logic leading you irrevocably thusward is positively Gilbertian.
Thus speaks a shameless Savoyard.
Okay, so we’ve all read the Asimov story.
Well it’s a long thread (and an old one) and I might have missed it, but did any one mention that in Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs had tigers roaming the jungles of Africa?
Tigers! In Africa?!
I’ll call this more of a “logical” mistake than a “factual” mistake:
I was reading a collection of H. P. Lovecraft short stories. One of the stories (can’t recall the title) was a science fiction story about a trip to Venus. Upon arriving on Venus, the crew of the spaceship splits up to go exploring. I’ll overlook the bad mistake of having the crew spread out singly instead of in pairs or small groups.
One of the crewmen encountered an invisible trap. He apparently bumped into an invisible wall of some sort, and soon discovered that he was in an invisible maze. He became trapped. I seem to remember that it started raining, and the fact that he was getting wet told him there was no roof on the maze. But the invisible walls were too high or too smooth to climb, or something like that.
So what really boggled me about this scenario was this: The author had conceived of space travel, but failed to come up with some way for the crewmen to communicate with each other at a distance. A simple two-way radio would have allowed the trapped crewman to call for help. I realize radio had not yet been invented at the time Lovecraft wrote the story, but he knew about the telegraph. He couldn’t have thought of a futuristic, wireless method of communicating? All the trapped fellow could do was hope that somebody would come looking for him.
I realize that a radio would have made the story less frightening, but still …
“In the Walls of Eryx” was written in 1936 and first published in 1939, long after radio was common worldwide. Commercial radio broadcasting in the U.S. began in 1920.
Yep. As I understand it Burroughs had Tarzan fighting tigers in the original 1912 edition, but in later editions the error was caught and the tigers became lions.
After fact-checking myself, it seems that in the serialized (magazine) version of Tarzan, his enemy Sabor was a tiger. In the book version, Sabor became a lion.
Just to be clear, I wasn’t expressing disbelief at the idea of Burroughs’s making such a mistake. I was quoting from the Zulu War segment of Monty Python’s Meaning of Life.
I noted this one last night. It’s quite a minor one - a typo really, but quite obvious - in the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Speckled Band. Holmes’ client, Miss Helen Stoner, is the stepdaughter of Dr Grimesby Roylott. Yet at one stage during the story Holmes refers to her as Miss Roylott, rather than Miss Stoner.
Also there’s a point about The Adventure of the Tree Students that has always puzzled me. This concerns three uni students who are preparing for an exam in Ancient Greek. One of the students, accidentally finding himself with an opportunity to view the exam paper, gives in to temptation and starts laboriously copying down the whole unseen passage. Perhaps exam practice was different then, but every unseen passage that I’ve ever had on a Greek exam was referenced. So I’d have thought all the student needed to do was note down the source of the passage and then go and get the original from the library.
Ah, my bad. I mistakenly thought he did his writing in the late 19th century. But the mistake is all the more glaring, if he did know about radio.
But Lovecraft does mention radio use in “Within the Walls of Eryx”:
The crew landed a long time ago, established a base, and thought they were familiar with all the dangers of Venus. The trapped man was sent out alone to prospect for valuable crystals- something that happened all the time without incident.
Guess I remembered the particulars wrong. But I distinctly remember thinking, as I was reading, “Why doesn’t this guy have a radio?”
Only in Kenya. 
Huh. I know it’s been a long long time, but here I thought it was just the implied sexual domination of Rilian the Emerald Witch that creeped me out. 
Ah, but were there portable* transistor* radios in 1939?