If you collect stamps, there is no doubt that you want the Inverted Jenny as part of your collection. This is a postage stamp issued in the US on May 10, 1918. The design of the stamp was supposed to contain a picture of the Curtiss JN-4 airplane. Through a mistake in the printing process, the image of the airplane was accidentally placed on the stamp upside down. The error was the most highly prized mistake in stamp printing history. Since only about 100 of these stamps are still in existence, it is extremely rare and valuable.



How did this mistake happen? During the 1910 decade, the postal system of the United States went through many experiments to find ways of making mail delivery faster. One of the ways it came up with was by air and the Curtiss Jenny was one of the planes used for carrying mail. The postal system wanted a new stamp for its airmail and decided that a depiction of the plane used for the mail routes was the perfect one to use. It was in a rush to make these stamps available to post offices with engraving starting on May 4 and printing starting on May 10.

The stamp contained two colours and with the technology available in the early part of the 20th century, this meant that the stamp had to be printed twice. When the sheets of stamps were fed through the printing press a second time, they were placed upside down and so the plane was upside down on the final result. These stamps were printed in sheets of 100 instead of the usual 400. Three sheets were discovered and destroyed, but one sheet of 100 stamps escaped detection and was released. This is the sheet of stamps that still survives to this day.

The mistake was made public and stamp collectors rushed to the post office to buy the new stamp hoping they would be lucky enough to find one. It was W.T. Robey who was the lucky collector who purchased the full sheet of stamps when he went to make an ordinary purchase at his local post office. He asked to see more sheets of the stamps, but there were no other misprints in the batch. Once he announced his find, he did receive visits from postal inspectors and he had to hide the stamps. He later sold the sheet to a dealer in Philadelphia named Eugene Klein for $1500. Klein sold the stamps to Colonel H.R. Green for a considerable profit. The price was $20,000.

Green decided to break up the stamps into blocks and sell each one separately. He even had one placed in a locket as a gift for his wife. If you want to buy one of these blocks of stamps today, you will have to shell out a lot of money. A center block costs about $600,000.

In the US election of 2006, election workers in Florida found one of these stamps affixed to a mail in ballot. Since there was no return address or no identification on the ballot, the ballot was disqualified and the workers had no hint as to who the sender could have been. This means that it is possible there are more Inverted Jennies out there than was previously thought.