Category: Apparatus that reported itself

The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

Bathybius haeckelii – A living slime said to carpet the Atlantic floor, described in 1868 from mud kept eleven years in alcohol. The alcohol had made it.
Interferometry – It counts stripes, and reports the difference between two light paths without caring what caused it. That is its power and every misreading of it.
Peter van de Kamp – Announced the first planet outside the solar system in 1963. The wobble was his telescope, and it changed on the dates the lens was cleaned.
Dayton Miller – Eminent American physicist (1866–1941) who spent thirty years detecting an aether drift later reassigned, in full, to the temperature of his hut.
The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise – The ninth volume of a series of eight. Nobody commissioned it; Babbage paid for it, and made his case on an engine built to break its own rule on cue.
The Pioneer anomaly – A sunward drift on both Pioneers that outlasted the missions and stayed unexplained for thirty years. It was waste heat: the craft were pushing themselves.
The speed of light – Measured for three centuries, wrong by four times its own error bar for twenty years, then fixed by vote in 1983. It can no longer be measured.
Cyrus Teed – Held that we live on the inside of the Earth, and surveyed four miles of Florida beach to prove it. The instrument sagged, and the sea came up to meet it.