Ten of the best-known "mistakes" in modern history are a publisher passing on Harry Potter, Decca turning down the Beatles, Excite declining to buy Google, Facebook rejecting a future WhatsApp founder, a Welshman binning a hard drive full of bitcoin, a Tokyo trader's typing slip, France's too-wide trains, a one-letter error at Companies House, the Khwarazm Shah's provocation of Genghis Khan and the legend of the British soldier who spared Hitler. Some are well documented, some are exaggerated, and one is probably not true at all.
Each story below gives what actually happened, what is still disputed and what was knowable at the moment the decision was made. That last part matters. A choice can look foolish only because we now know how things turned out, and the most useful lesson from these cases is often not "they were stupid" but "here is how a reasonable-sounding decision went wrong".
Publishing and music: the talent that got away
1. Twelve publishers said no to Harry Potter
J.K. Rowling's first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was turned down by twelve publishers before Bloomsbury took it on. Her agent spent about a year sending it around, and several editors felt a children's book of roughly 90,000 words was simply too long. At Bloomsbury, editor Barry Cunningham backed it, and the young daughter of the company's chief executive, Nigel Newton, read the opening chapter and wanted more.
Bloomsbury paid an advance of just £2,500 and printed 500 hardback copies in June 1997, most of which went to libraries. The series has since sold more than 600 million copies and been translated into over 80 languages. In fairness to the rejecting editors, long debut novels for children were a genuine commercial risk in the mid-1990s; nobody could have predicted a global phenomenon from a manuscript.
2. Decca chose the Tremeloes over the Beatles
On 1 January 1962 the Beatles, then managed by Brian Epstein and still with Pete Best on drums, recorded fifteen songs at Decca's studio in West Hampstead, London. About a month later Decca said no and signed another band that auditioned the same day, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, who were local to London and cheaper to work with.
Decca executive Dick Rowe is usually blamed and is often credited with the line that "guitar groups are on the way out", but he denied saying it for the rest of his life, and it is not certain who made the final call. Five of the audition tracks were eventually released on Anthology 1 in 1995. Rowe did go on to sign the Rolling Stones, reportedly on George Harrison's tip, so his career was hardly ruined by one miss.
Money and technology: fortunes missed by a whisker
3. The hard drive in the Newport landfill
James Howells, an IT engineer from Newport in Wales, began mining bitcoin in February 2009, when the coins were worth next to nothing. He stored the private key for about 8,000 bitcoins (some reports say 7,500) on a laptop hard drive. In the summer of 2013, during a clear-out, the drive ended up in a bin bag and then in the city's landfill site.
For more than a decade he asked Newport City Council for permission to dig, offering to share any recovered fortune with the city. The council refused, citing environmental and safety risks. In January 2025 the High Court dismissed his claim as having no realistic prospect of success, and in March 2025 the Court of Appeal declined to take the case further. By then his lost coins were valued at several hundred million pounds. Later in 2025 he said he had given up trying to recover the drive.
4. Excite turned down Google for $750,000
In 1999 Larry Page and Sergey Brin, still Stanford graduate students, offered their search engine to Excite, one of the big web portals of the day, for $1 million. Investor Vinod Khosla, who sat on Excite's board, talked them down to $750,000, and Excite's chief executive George Bell still said no.
Bell later explained that the sticking point was Page's condition that Excite replace its own search technology with Google's. That makes the refusal more understandable: he would have been throwing out his company's core product for an unproven one. Today Alphabet, Google's parent company, is valued in the trillions of dollars, while Excite faded after a costly merger with @Home.
5. Mizuho's "fat finger" trade in Tokyo
In December 2005 a trader at Mizuho Securities meant to sell one share of a newly listed staffing company, J-Com, for 610,000 yen. Instead the order went in as 610,000 shares at 1 yen each, many times more shares than the company had actually issued. Attempts to cancel it failed because of a fault in the Tokyo Stock Exchange's trading system.
Mizuho had to buy back shares at market prices and lost around 40 billion yen, roughly £190 million at the time. The exchange's president resigned, and Mizuho sued the TSE; in 2009 a Tokyo court awarded it about 10.7 billion yen in damages. The episode is now a classic example of why trading systems include sanity checks on order size.
6. Facebook said no to a WhatsApp founder
After leaving Yahoo, Brian Acton applied to both Twitter and Facebook in 2009 and was turned down by both. He posted about it publicly with remarkable good grace:
That same year his former Yahoo colleague Jan Koum incorporated WhatsApp, and Acton joined him as co-founder. In 2014 Facebook bought the company for about $19 billion in cash and stock. Hiring decisions are made one candidate at a time, though; nobody at Facebook in 2009 was choosing between Acton and a future multibillion-dollar app.
Paperwork and engineering: small errors, big bills
7. France's new trains were too wide for some platforms
In May 2014 France's national rail operator SNCF and infrastructure manager RFF admitted a costly mismatch. Regional councils had ordered 341 new regional trains from Alstom and Bombardier, part of a programme widely reported at around 15 billion euros. The trains had reportedly been designed using measurements for recently built platforms, but many older stations sat too close to the track.
About 1,300 of the roughly 8,700 regional platforms had to be shaved back, at a cost reported at tens of millions of euros. The trains themselves were fine and entered service; the lesson was about checking assumptions across organisations that each believed the other had done the measuring.
8. One extra "s" sank a Welsh engineering firm
On 20 February 2009 Companies House, the UK register of businesses, recorded a winding-up order against Taylor and Sons Ltd, a South Wales steel fabrication firm founded in 1875. The order actually belonged to an unrelated Manchester company called Taylor and Son Ltd. The mistake was corrected within three days, but credit agencies had already passed it on.
Suppliers and the bank withdrew credit, and within two months the healthy company was in administration, with the loss of about 250 jobs. In January 2015 the High Court ruled that Companies House owed a duty of care and was liable in negligence, in a claim valued at nearly £9 million by former managing director Philip Davison-Sebry.
War and empire: decisions with far heavier costs
9. Provoking Genghis Khan
In 1218 a Mongol trade caravan arrived at Otrar, a city of the Khwarazmian Empire, which stretched across much of Central Asia, Iran and Afghanistan. The local governor, Inalchuq, accused the merchants of spying, seized their goods and had them killed. Genghis Khan sent envoys to Shah Muhammad II demanding justice; the shah refused, executed one envoy and humiliated the others.
The Mongols invaded in 1219. Over the next two years great cities such as Bukhara, Samarkand, Merv and Nishapur were taken, and many were devastated. Estimates of the Mongol army vary widely, from around 75,000 to 200,000 among modern historians, while medieval chroniclers gave far larger figures. The shah died a fugitive on an island in the Caspian Sea in 1220. Older versions of this story place the empire in modern Iraq; its heartland was in fact further east.
10. The soldier who supposedly spared Hitler
Henry Tandey was one of the most decorated British private soldiers of the First World War, winning the Victoria Cross for his actions at Marcoing, France, on 28 September 1918. A popular story claims that on that day he saw a wounded German soldier and chose not to shoot him, and that the man was Adolf Hitler, then a lance corporal.
The evidence is weak. Hitler's service records suggest he was on leave in Germany at the time. The story seems to have grown from a painting of a 1914 battlefield scene that Hitler acquired in 1937, and from a second-hand account that he mentioned Tandey to Neville Chamberlain in 1938. Historians treat it as unproven at best. For the bigger picture of how that war ended and reshaped Europe, see our piece on World War I's end and Europe's changing borders.
What these stories really teach about mistakes
Psychologists call the tendency to see past events as obvious "hindsight bias". Once we know the Beatles conquered the world, Decca's rejection looks absurd. At the time, it was one audition by a band that had not yet written its best songs.
A few practical lessons stand out across all ten cases:
- Separate bad luck from bad process. Excite and Facebook made defensible choices with the information they had. Mizuho, SNCF and Companies House had process gaps that checks could have caught.
- Build in a second look. A confirmation step on large orders, a measurement cross-check between partners, or a requirement to match company numbers rather than names would each have prevented a disaster.
- Back up what matters. The Howells story is, at heart, an argument for keeping copies of anything valuable in more than one place.
- Be suspicious of a perfect story. The Tandey legend survives because it is dramatic, not because it is proven.
If one of your own decisions is still bothering you, it may help to ask the same question: what did I reasonably know at the time? For a gentler take on living with errors, read our guide to turning a setback into a useful next step.
Sources: Wikipedia: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone; Wikipedia: Harry Potter; Wikipedia: Decca audition; Wikipedia: Bitcoin buried in Newport landfill; Wikipedia: Excite; Wikipedia: Mizuho Securities; Wikipedia: Brian Acton; The Connexion: New SNCF trains are too wide; Channel 4 News: Companies House spelling mistake; Osborne Clarke: The £9 million Companies House typo; Wikipedia: Mongol invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire; Wikipedia: Henry Tandey.
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