13-year-old Benjamin Lerman Coady was visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) with his mom several months ago but instead of just staring at exhibits and mindlessly walking away the young man actually discovered an error.
The seventh-grader from Connecticut was walking through the permanent Byzantine Empire exhibit when he noticed that a map claiming to show the Byzantine empire was missing Spain and a chunk of Africa that existed during the time of the empire.
After realizing the mistake the Hartford Courant reports that Benjamin told a docent who referred the young man to the front desk where he was able to fill out an error report.
Coady tells the Courant that he didn’t think his message would be taken seriously:
“The front desk didn’t believe me. I’m only a kid.”
While many of the “error” reports the museum receives end up being incorrect this wasn’t one of those cases and several months after the 13-year-old filed the error report he received an email from the Byzantine art curator who said “”You are, of course, correct.”
The curator of the section even offered Benjamin a chance to head back to the Met to meet with her, telling him that he has “the makings of a young historian.”
In the meantime Coady has different plans for his future, telling the paper:
“I want to move to Greenwich and open a modern exotic car shop.”
Are you more impressed with the teenagers discovery or surprised by the curators failure to realize the maps original errors?
