In Wikepedia under "The New York Times" I found this famous mistake:

Famous mistakes
In 1920, a New York Times editorial ridiculed Robert Goddard and his claim that a rocket would work in space:

That Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react – to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools