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The Economic Times
The Economic Times
National

In 1918, a Washington clerk spent $24 on 100 stamps during his lunch break. Every plane was upside down, one later sold for $2 million

Washington D.C.

A Washington clerk walked into a post office during his lunch break on May 14, 1918, and bought something that appeared ordinary: a sheet of 100 new 24-cent airmail stamps. Then William Robey noticed something was wrong. Every Curtiss JN-4 biplane printed on the sheet was upside down.

What followed turned the sheet into one of the most famous errors in stamp-collecting history — the Inverted Jenny. More than a century later, individual stamps from that sheet have become multimillion-dollar collectibles.

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