In my Gallery of Hoax Websites (which I created about four years ago, and which has since been superceded by the Hoax Websites category of the weblog), I list the website of Boilerplate, the Victorian Era Robot. The site details the history of a robot named Boilerplate who was supposedly created during the 19th century in order to replace humans in combat. I admit that the site had me going for a while, and that I only realized it was a hoax when I tried to check the bibliographic references, none of which referred to real books. It seems I wasn't the only one to be taken in by Boilerplate. The New York Times reports that comedian Chris Elliott, believing Boilerplate was a nineteenth-hoax (not a modern one), incorporated the robot into his historical novel, The Shroud of the Thwacker. Only when the creator of Boilerplate threatened to sue him for copyright infringement did Elliott realize his mistake. If only Elliott had checked my site, he would have known better.
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