0:00 In seventeen eighty-seven, an eighteenth-century Scottish writer named William Thomson published a massive, two-volume Latin translation of British history, and in the preface, he casually solved a major historical mystery by attributing the whole thing to the wrong dead guy.0:17 And here is why that caught my eye.0:19 In episode one hundred ninety, we looked at the Great Moon Hoax, where a New York newspaper convinced readers that winged bat-men were roaming lunar craters.0:28 Well, four years before Thomson published that botched translation, he wrote his own satirical lunar romp called The Man in the Moon, poking fun at society in the style of Jonathan Swift.0:40 But while the bat-men hoax was an intentional, deliberate piece of comedic theater, Thomson's real-life blunder in seventeen eighty-seven was totally accidental, entirely preventable, and yet it ended up muddying historical records for decades.0:55 Here is the setup.0:56 Thomson was hired by a man named Thomas Hollingbery to translate a sprawling Latin manuscript titled History of Great Britain from the Revolution of 1688 to the Accession of George the First.1:08 The manuscript was written by a man named Alexander Cunningham.1:12 So far, so good.1:13 Thomson gets to work, cranks through the dense Latin text, and produces two handsome volumes.1:19 Then he decides to write an introduction.1:21 Now, if you are introducing an obscure historical text, the bare minimum assignment is knowing whose work you just spent months translating.1:30 But eighteenth-century Scotland had a bit of a duplicate naming crisis.1:34 There was Alexander Cunningham the historian, who served as a British diplomat in Venice and died around seventeen thirty-seven.1:42 And then there was Alexander Cunningham of Block, a celebrated literary critic and scholar who died around seventeen thirty.1:50 Instead of checking the public records, Thomson looked at both men, shrugged, and decided they must be the exact same human being.1:58 In his introduction, Thomson lays out this elaborate case that the critic and the historian were one and the same person.2:05 He was so confident about it.2:07 He put it in print, bound it in leather, and shipped it off to the readers of Great Britain.2:13 Except, surviving legal wills existed.2:15 Extant wills!2:16 That is the detail that gets me.2:18 All anyone had to do to shatter Thomson's grand thesis was look at the probate records.2:23 The wills proved unequivocally that Alexander Cunningham the critic and Alexander Cunningham the historian had entirely different estates, entirely different heirs, and died in different places at different times.2:36 They were literally two separate corpses.2:39 Yet Thomson just welded their biographies together because it made for a neater story.2:44 Where have we seen this before?2:46 It is the classic pattern of confirmation bias in editorial prefaces.2:50 We see it in modern journalism and publishing all the time: an expert does the grueling, faithful translation work, but when it comes time to build the frame around the work, they take the shortcut that flatters their intuition.3:04 Think of early internet databases accidentally merging two actors with the same name into a single filmography, or contemporary encyclopedias cross-wiring corporate executive bios.3:15 When you want two puzzle pieces to fit, you just sand down the corners until they slide together.3:21 And Thomson was not some careless rookie who wandered into a print shop.3:26 This was a prolific professional writer.3:28 In seventeen eighty-two, he published Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa.3:33 In seventeen eighty-three, he dropped that biting Swiftian satire, The Man in the Moon.3:38 He understood print culture.3:40 He understood persuasion.3:42 But the second he stepped outside the four corners of his Latin manuscript to do actual archival forensics, he fell into the easiest trap in intellectual history: assuming that two people sharing a rare talent and a common name must be a single genius.3:57 The fallout of a mistake like that is insidious.4:00 When an introduction gets bound to a definitive two-volume history, it becomes the front door through which every subsequent researcher enters.4:09 For generations, anyone studying the transition from the Glorious Revolution of sixteen eighty-eight to the Hanoverian succession had to mentally peel Thomson's imaginary hybrid scholar apart just to figure out whose political biases were on the page.4:24 It is easy to laugh at nineteenth-century newspaper readers falling for moon bat-men.4:30 A flying humanoid is an obvious, splashy fiction.4:33 But the errors that actually survive, the ones that anchor themselves into libraries and reference shelves for centuries, do not arrive with wings and fur.4:42 They arrive bound in calfskin, carrying serious titles, signed by respected translators who simply refused to read a will.4:50 Thomson wanted an intellectual titan, and in inventing one, he left historians two centuries of probate paperwork to untangle.
