A case of a fake that became real. In this case, a fictitious town that, for a while, achieved actual existence.
The town of
Agloe, New York was a "copyright trap" placed on Esso Maps during the 1930s. (That is, it was a nonexistent town whose purpose was to reveal if rival mapmakers were blindly copying the information on Esso maps.) The name was a scramble of the initials of Otto G. Lindberg (the company founder) and his assistant Ernest Alpers. They located the town at a dirt-road intersection north of Roscoe, NY.
So when the town of Agloe later appeared on a Rand McNally map, Esso accused Rand McNally of copying their map. But it turned out that Rand McNally was innocent. The town of Agloe actually had been registered with the county administration, because someone had built a general store at that dirt intersection and had named it the Agloe General Store (because that's the name they saw on the Esso map), thus bringing the town into existence.
Eventually the store went out of business, and the town of Agloe is no longer on maps. Here's the Google Map location for
Roscoe, New York.
Other cases of fakes that became real:
Kremvax was a 1984 Usenet April Fool's Day hoax, alleging that the Soviet Union was joining Usenet. The announcement purported to come from Konstantin Chernenko, who used the email address
[email protected]. Six years later, when the Soviet Union really did link up to the internet, it adopted the domain name Kremvax in honor of the hoax.
The Annual Virginia City Camel Race. Began as a hoax in 1959, perpetrated by the Nevada
Territorial Enterprise, but other newspapers decided to take it seriously and actually began racing camels every year in the city.
I'm sure there are other examples, but I can't think of them right now. (I'm not counting instances of names inspired by fiction, such as the space shuttle Enterprise being named after the USS Enterprise in Star Trek.)
Comments
>>On September 17, 1976, Enterprise was rolled out of Rockwell's plant at Palmdale, California. In recognition of its fictional namesake, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and most of the cast of the original series of Star Trek were on hand at the dedication ceremony.<<
zzxjoanw: the name of a Maori drum, from Rupert Hughes
On the other hand, the first shuttle, Challenger blew up.
...the first shuttle that orbited, Challenger...
(Of course, some Star Trek geeks could probably have come up with the proper name given that incident.)
Hmm.....Lewis Black, Emily Litella, trusts Wiki, Englebert, a profile emerges.....
I worked in the Lehigh Valley/Allentown, PA area. One day, I looked at a map and picked Coplay, a small town north of Allentown for the gag. I explained on the air that Coplay was a "copyright trap," like Agloe and that there was actually no such place.
I kept the gag up for a few years, even when our news girl read stories based in Coplay; I would interrupt her (much to her annoyance) and calmly explain that Coplay was a fictitious place put on maps to preserve the map company's copyright.
Man, did people get mad at me! I would get calls from people who lived there who would try to convince me that Coplay did, in fact, exist. I would act as if THEY were the ones pulling a gag and tell them that I wasn't going to play along with their stupid joke.
One lady told me she was a Realtor who had been selling homes in Coplay for many years. I calmly informed her that if she really was selling property in a non-existent town, she was breaking too many laws to count. She seemed to be at a loss to respond.
Unfortunately google maps doesn't have satellite images of high enough resolution to see the sad, out of business gas station that gave the town existence.
I just made it up out of my own little mind. I had read about map companies using "traps" and I thought it would be funny to turn that around.
aglow with thoughts of you.