The Version Everyone Remembers

Wooden teeth, lemmings off a cliff, a bee that could not fly, and a ten-percent brain. The version that stuck, and the record underneath it.

The tidy version travels farther than the correction. Washington’s teeth were wood. Lemmings march off cliffs. A scientist proved the bumblebee cannot fly. You only use ten percent of your brain. Each of those sentences is famous. Each of them lost an argument with the evidence and kept the audience anyway.

Washington’s teeth were never wood. The lemmings never jumped. The bumblebee was never proved flightless. The ten-percent brain is a claim the brain itself does not support. The million-dollar space pen is the story of a pen NASA supposedly overpaid for, set next to the pencils it actually bought.

This page is the shelf those versions share. Start here for the teeth, the lemmings, and the brain, and for the longer record of stories that outran the footnote.

• George Washington's Wooden Teeth — Which Were Never Made of Wood
• The Misplaced Decimal Point That Made Spinach Famous — and Never Existed
• The Easter Island Statues That 'Walked' to Work — and the 18 People Who Took One for a Stroll
• The Fizzing Candy That Supposedly Exploded Kids' Stomachs — and the 50,000 Letters Sent to Say It Didn't
• The Library Supposedly Sinking Because the Architect Forgot About the Books
• The Space Shuttle Boosters Supposedly Sized by the Rear Ends of Two Roman Horses
• The Bumblebee That Science Supposedly Proved Couldn't Fly
• The Doctor Who Cracked the Knuckles of Only One Hand for 60 Years to Prove His Mother Wrong
• The Night-Fighter Ace Whose Secret Radar Got Blamed on Carrots
• The Great Wall 'Visible From the Moon' — Promised 215 Years Before Anyone Could Check
• The 3,000-Year-Old Pharaoh Who Flew to Paris for a Fungus Treatment — Without a Passport
• The Baguette Blamed for Overheating the Large Hadron Collider
• The Opera Costume Designer Who Put Horns on the Vikings
• The 14-Year-Old Who Convinced 43 Classmates to Ban Water
• The Children's Toy That Came With Four Jars of Uranium — and Flopped Because of the Price
• The Frozen Chicken Cannon That Supposedly Wrecked a British Train
• The Moon Golf Shot That Went 'Miles and Miles and Miles' — and Actually Went 40 Yards
• The Starlings America Blamed on Shakespeare — and the One Sentence That Invented the Story
• The Duck Borrowed From a Farm to Prove That Quacks Do Echo
• The Recipe for Making Mice Out of a Sweaty Shirt and a Jar of Wheat
• The Army Captain Who Asked Congress to Fund a Trip Inside the Earth
• The Mummy's Curse That Missed Its Main Target
• The Million-Dollar Space Pen Myth — and the $128.89 Pencils NASA Actually Bought
• The Baghdad Battery: The 2,000-Year-Old 'Battery' That Probably Never Held a Charge
• The Bathtub That Took 24 Hours to Drain to Test a Myth
• The Chess-Playing Machine That Beat Napoleon (With a Man Hidden Inside)
• The Lemmings That Never Jumped Off the Cliff
• Spontaneous Human Combustion: The Myth That Refused to Burn Out
• The Newspaper Hoax That Put Bat-People on the Moon
• The Park Ranger Struck by Lightning Seven Times
• The Petrified Giant That Was a Fake of a Fake
• Göbekli Tepe: The Temple Built Before Farming, Writing, or the Wheel
• The Myth That You Only Use 10% of Your Brain
• The Warship That Never Actually Teleported to Norfolk

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