The earliest printing Quote Investigator has found is 2 April 1969, in the Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Virginia ↗, as a free-standing paragraph under the name ‘Senator Soaper’ — the comic alter ego of Kansas City Star columnist Bill Vaughan, who carried the line under his own byline four days later. Agatha Christie’s name is attached because Hallowe’en Party, published later the same year, contains a different computer joke built on the same Pope proverb; the wording above is not hers.
“To Err is Human; To Really Foul Things Up Requires a Computer” Bill Vaughan, writing as "Senator Soaper," Free Lance-Star, 2 April 1969. Not Agatha Christie. Via Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Agatha Christie. Use the credit shown above instead.
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In context
Evoking the world of Bill Vaughan — American newspaper columnist and humorist. Theme: "To Err is Human; To Really Foul Things Up Requires a Computer". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "To Err is Human; To Really Foul Things Up Requires a Computer". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
Where the line actually first appears
Earliest printing
Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, Virginia), 2 April 1969, p. 1, col. 2
Column
Senator Soaper
Author
Bill Vaughan, Kansas City Star — bylined in “Senator Soaper Says:”, 6 April 1969
First named credit
Dorothy Sarnoff, Speech Can Change Your Life (1970), p. 288
To err is human; to really foul things up requires a computer.
Newspaper paragraph, 1969
It ran as a free-standing paragraph on page one under the standing name ‘Senator Soaper’ — no article, no set-up, no byline. Four days later the same line led the “Senator Soaper Says:” column with Vaughan’s name on it, and the day after that the Hartford Courant ran it with no attribution at all.
2 April 1969 — the earliest close match located by Quote Investigator ↗, printed in the Free Lance-Star under the name of the imaginary legislator ‘Senator Soaper’. Bill Vaughan had written that syndicated feature since taking it over from Harry V. Wade in 1953.
6 April 1969 — the same line leads the “Senator Soaper Says:” column with Vaughan’s byline in the Independent Press-Telegram; by 1970 Dorothy Sarnoff prints it in Speech Can Change Your Life with the credit ‘BILL VAUGHAN’ attached, both per QI ↗.
November 1969 — Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party is published by the Collins Crime Club, with a US edition from Dodd, Mead the same year ↗. It contains a different computer joke, spoken by Ariadne Oliver — QI credits Christie with that sentence, and notes that because book composition timelines are unknown, which writer got there first cannot be settled.
1982 onward — Paul Ehrlich picks up the credit in A Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations and later in newspaper filler, while the Oxford, Yale and Columbia quotation dictionaries all carry the line as anonymous — QI finds no early support for Ehrlich ↗.
The wording is a 1969 American newspaper column item, so it falls well after the pre-1931 line for US public domain and should be treated as in copyright. The same is true of the Christie passage often confused with it: Hallowe’en Party was first published in 1969 (Collins Crime Club, UK; Dodd, Mead, US) and remains under the control of the Christie estate and its publishers. Short attributed quotation for commentary and criticism is a separate question from reproduction.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Who it gets pinned on, and why
This line has attracted three separate false owners: a novelist who wrote a different joke the same year, a biologist credited a decade later with no evidence, and ‘Anonymous’ — the default whenever a newspaper paragraph outlives its byline.
✕
The whole lineAgatha Christie conflation
Christie wrote a computer joke, but not this one. In Hallowe’en Party (1969) Mrs Oliver tells Poirot: “I know there’s a proverb which says, ‘To err is human’ but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries.” Quote Investigator credits Christie with that sentence ↗ — and Bill Vaughan with the ‘foul things up’ wording. The two get merged, and Christie’s is the famous name, so hers is the one that sticks.
✕
The whole linePaul Ehrlich later credit
Quote Investigator ↗ reports that Jonathon Green’s A Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (1982) credited the biologist Paul Ehrlich, sourcing it to the Farmers Almanac of 1978, and that newspapers repeated the Ehrlich credit in 1992. QI has located no comparably early citation supporting him.
✕
The whole lineAnonymous reference works
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, the Yale Book of Quotations and the Columbia Dictionary of Quotations all print the adage without an author, according to QI’s survey of the three ↗.
✕
The first half onlyAlexander Pope genuine, but only the setup
“To err is human” really is Pope’s, from An Essay on Criticism ↗ — but the computer half is a twentieth-century joke bolted onto it, and Pope is sometimes cited as though he owned the whole sentence.
✓On the evidence assembled by Quote Investigator ↗, the earliest known printing is 2 April 1969 under the ‘Senator Soaper’ name, with Bill Vaughan’s byline on it four days later — and QI’s own verdict is that Vaughan “should receive credit for now.”
Context
Two computer jokes, one 1711 proverb, the same year
Bill Vaughan wrote for a vanished newspaper genre: the paragraph, a self-contained joke of one or two lines dropped into a column with no set-up and no punchline beyond itself. That format is precisely why this line lost its author. As Vaughan himself told Time in 1962, in a profile quoted by Quote Investigator ↗, paragraphing was a trade of borrowed lines — funny, portable, and easy to reprint without a name attached.
The coincidence that muddied the water is real: in the same year, Agatha Christie published Hallowe’en Party, in which Mrs Oliver needles Poirot about his electric-light bill and twists the same Alexander Pope proverb toward computers. Quote Investigator credits Christie with her own line ↗ and Vaughan with this one, while noting the ordering of composition cannot be established — and even raising the possibility that Vaughan was influenced by Christie’s passage.
Paragraphing was always based on a firm foundation of mutual plagiarism.
The Pope line underneath both jokes
Both quips are variations on Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism, first published in 1711 and reprinted in Pope’s 1717 collected Works ↗. Quote Investigator notes that the 1711 printing used the older spelling ‘Humane’, and that a later edition’s title page dated the poem’s composition to 1709.
Vaughan’s version spread fast and anonymously. By August 1969 a West Virginia columnist reported it as graffiti; by 1980 the Washington Post noted you could buy it on a novelty plaque. Neither carried his name.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1915–1977 · American newspaper columnist and humorist
William Edward ‘Bill’ Vaughan (8 October 1915 – 25 February 1977) was born in St. Louis and wrote a syndicated column for the Kansas City Star from 1946 until his death. He was a paragrapher — a specialist in the one- or two-sentence newspaper joke — and took over the long-running syndicated feature ‘Senator Soaper Says’ from Harry V. Wade in 1953, voicing it through an imaginary legislator. Time profiled him in 1962 as a ‘Star Paragrapher’, and noted that his lines were widely reprinted without credit, which is exactly what happened to this one.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented printing
Earliest close match located by Quote Investigator: “Senator Soaper” (free-standing quote), Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, VA), 2 April 1969, p. 1, col. 2; carried under Bill Vaughan’s byline in “Senator Soaper Says:”, Independent Press-Telegram (Long Beach, CA), 6 April 1969, p. B-2. Credited to Vaughan by name in Dorothy Sarnoff, Speech Can Change Your Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 288.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘To Err is Human; To Really Foul Things Up Requires a Computer’?” Last verified 7 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/to-err-is-human-to-really-foul-things-up-requires-a-computer/