Today in 1749 two British nobles decided to play a trick on London’s theatergoers.
And their trick, known today as the Great Bottle Hoax, proved their point… while also managing to mostly backfire.
The hoax began as a bet between the Duke of Portland and the Earl of Chesterfield.
The Duke suggested that a theater could advertise a show featuring someone doing something completely impossible, and there would still be “fools enough in London to fill a playhouse and pay handsomely for the privilege of being there.”
The Earl of Chesterfield took the bet, saying, “Surely if a man should say that he would jump into a quart bottle, nobody would believe that.”
They put it to the test, putting an ad in the paper that said a man would appear at a theater the following week and, among other feats, would squeeze himself into a common wine bottle, sing while inside, and allow anyone in the audience to handle the bottle and look in on him.
The night of the show, the New Theatre in the Haymarket was jam-packed, just as the Duke expected.
But now the nobles had a problem: they had a big crowd expecting a show they knew they couldn’t provide.
Time passed, and no one appeared onstage; the audience started to get restless.
A guy from the theater came out to apologize and offer refunds if no one began the show.
But by then, the audience had waited too long; they wrecked the theater on their way out and someone took all the receipts before the theater could issue refunds.
Most of the newspapers made fun of ticketbuyers, asking how on earth they could’ve fallen for such an obvious scam?
One paper offered a very tongue-in-cheek explanation: they figured the mysterious performer had been on hand to do the show, but he’d done the bottle trick backstage for someone before the show, and that person just picked up the bottle with the man inside, put it in his pocket, and left.
In December of last year, police in Heber City, Utah were testing a system that would use artificial intelligence to analyze body camera video to generate police reports.
Except that in one case, the system mistook the sounds of the movie “The Princess and the Frog” playing in the background of a police call as part of the call.
And so the report claimed that during the incident, one of the officers turned into a frog.
As a sergeant later said, “That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports.”
The Great Bottle Conjurer Hoax (The Paris Review)
Ribbit ribbit! Artificial Intelligence programs used by Heber City police claim officer turned into a frog (Fox 13 Now)
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Image via Wikicommons
