🔬 Science 22h ago · Science Blog Editorial Team

A Washington clerk paid $24 for 100 new airmail stamps in 1918 and realized every airplane on the sheet was upside down — no other misprinted sheet ever reached the public, and one of those 24-cent stamps later sold for $2 million

ScienceBlog
ScienceBlog news
View Channel →
Source ↗ 👁 0 💬 0
The clerk at the New York Avenue post office had never seen an aeroplane, which turned out to be a two million dollar blind spot.
Lunchtime, 14 May 1918. William Robey, a 29-year-old Washington clerk with a stamp habit, had walked over from his office hoping for exactly this. The new airmail issue had gone on sale the day before, timed to the first scheduled flights. Its design needed two colours, carmine rose for the frame and deep blue for the biplane, which meant every sheet went through the

Comments (0)

Sign in to join the discussion

More Like This

📰
Hedgehogs were let go in a South Uist garden in 1974 to deal with the slugs, by 2010 there were 3,900 of them on the islands eating wader eggs, a trial at Drimore lifted 64 out in eight weeks, and clearing the last 400 sq km is costed at 3.5 to 5.0 million pounds and 18 staff.
ScienceBlog.com · 2h ago
World's water cycle becoming more unpredictable, UN warns
Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories · 2h ago
NASA spacecraft discovers a huge new crater on the moon
Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories · 3h ago
📰
The James Webb telescope does not orbit Earth: it circles the Sun–Earth L2 point 1.5 million kilometres away, keeping its mirror permanently shielded from the Sun—and unlike Hubble, it was never designed for astronauts to repair.
ScienceBlog.com · 3h ago
Climate change made deadly Nepal glacier and rock collapse more likely, according to analysis
Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories · 3h ago
Does AI make us smarter or more dependent?
Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories · 4h ago