The real quote is

'Alas, poor Yorick.  I knew him, Horatio, a man of infinite jest and mirth'

An James T Kirk never actually said "Beam me up, Scotty' either.

Heleanor Feltham

 ----------
From: daemon
To: MUSEUM-L
Subject: Re: Ketchup and Hollywood
Date: Tuesday, 12 August 1997 12:33PM

Ketchup is actually not "copyrighted" but is a tradename of the Heinz
company. That's why others call their product ketSup (or some other
variant). McDonalds has been able to prevent even this having won suits
over just the MC part, for instance against a furniture store called
McFurniture.  In other instances though, popular tradenames have crossed
the threshold into public domain. This is why you now see so many oddly
personalized editions of "monopoly". I don't know how it hapenned but
Milton Bradley was not pleased to have lost their exclusive right to the
product.

On the hollywood bit, accuracy of perception has affected every type of
perception. The line "play it again Sam" does not appear in that Bogey
movie. But even Shakespeare was not immune from this. If my memory is
correct, the line "Alas poor Yorick (sp?), I knew him well" was NOT one
written by Shakespeare.


As in the case of brandnames where the origins of many words AS brand
names have been entirely forgotten, many many "facts" started as a bad
piece of info that got into so many textbooks to be copied then by other
textbooks that no one is even aware that the info pedegrie is dubious to
begin with.

There are many examples of this and I am sure museums fall prey. In one of
my own fields of Theatre lighting, we make use of a luminare and lens
identified both  as simply a "Fresnel". ALL the books correctly identify
that the unit and its associated stepped type lens are named after the
French optician by the same name, but over the many years people then
assumed that the naming meant that Fresnel had invented the new lens
design. In fact, he had not. Although he aparently worked with the design
and may have even made enhancements his name first became associated with
the product because he had been the minister in France with jurisdiction
over lighthouses. His insistance that all lighthouses use the new lens
revolutionized coastal navigation. Once associated with him the lens
became "his" lens.

One more fun example from American Pop culture can be found with Bugs
Bunny. As I understand it, the name came from one of the annimators (Chuck
Jones ?) who at the time was nicknamed "Bugs". If the version I heard is
correct, while the character without a name was being developed, the
colleagues were left to call the character "Bugs' Bunny".

Sometimes too I find that wrong impressions come from years of over
simplification. Again in theatre history lore, the texts often cite
Gilbert & Sullivan's Savoy Theatre in London as the first to be lit by
electricity. Imagine my horror as a researcher, though, when I looked at
actual accounts to discover the now unreported fact that the
electrification only applied to the LOBBY. In the scheme of theatre
lighting this doesn't count, but alas, now it's HISTORY so it has to be
true!

We know that "history is written by the victors". This seems especially
true today of CORPORATE victors. In my lighting research I found an ad in
The New York Times for a flashlight.....four years before "the flashlight
was invented". It didn't take long armed with this info to trace down the
origin of the misinformation. Much of lighting history comes from books
written by those associated with General Electric (Edison's Company). So
my strong guess is that the date one sees for the "invention of the
flashlight" is really the date of the introduction of General Electric's
flashlight!

I can't WAIT to see the history of the personal computer......as it later
will be written into history.....by Microsoft!

RF