A letter from mathematician/inventor Charles Babbage to Lord Alfred Tennyson references a line in his “otherwise beautiful poem” The Vision of Sin : “Every minute dies a man, every minute one is born.”
. . .I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:Every minute dies a man, And one and a sixteenth is bornThe actual number is much longer but I believe 1-1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.
Tennyson changed the line to read: “Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born.”See Katie Melua’s Bad Science for a very funny take on fact checking popular lyrics.
