Typically, the value of a stamp is determined by four distinct elements:
• The image on the face.
• The perforations along the edge where it was attached to its sheet.
• The denomination or monetary value.
• The country of origin—usually featured on the face.
The Most Valuable Stamps Ever Sold
Stamp includes these (crazy!)
The Treskilling Yellow stamp was issued in 1855 in Sweden. It was printed in the wrong color (yellow), when it should have been printed in green. It had an original value of three Swedish skillings. The only known copy in existence was postmarked in 1857. It was last sold at auction in 2010.
Treskilling means three skillings. The skilling (“shilling”, in English) was the Scandinavian equivalent of the shilling. The Swedish Krona was introduced in 1873. It replaced the Riksdaler.
Dag Hammarskjöld was a Swedish diplomat, who served as the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, from 1953 until his death in an airplane crash in 1961.
In 1962, the United States Post Office issued a commemorative 4-cent stamp for Hammarskjöld; due to a printing error, the yellow background of some stamps was accidentally inverted, creating a variant. In order to not create a rarity (and a run-up in the price of the variant on the secondary philatelic market), Postmaster General J. Edward Day ordered the Post Office to print over 40 million copies of the stamp with the inversion.
And stamp collectors were outraged by the Postmaster General’s decision at the time.
The rule against showing living persons on U.S. stamps has occasionally been waived, as in the semipostal (fundraising) stamp showing three FDNY firefighters, all three of whom were still alive, raising the U.S. flag at Ground Zero less than a year after the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
The Stamp Act of 1765, passed by the British government, imposed a tax on tax on all printed materials, including wills and deeds, newspapers, pamphlets and even playing cards. It was passed because Great Britain needed to pay for the debt it had incurred during the Seven Years’ War. Resistance to the Stamp Act culminated in riots in Boston, Portsmouth, and Savannah, and led to boycotts of British goods. The Act was repealed within a year.
The Hammarskjold invert was not the first time the Post Office deliberately reissued an incorrectly printed stamp to make the ‘error stamps’ worthless. In the early 1930s, then Postmaster General James Farley removed some sheets before they had gone through the perforation or gumming process, autographing them and giving them to family, friends, and colleagues.
Stamp collectors were understandably outraged once word got out as to what had happened, and the Post Office was forced to resolve the problem by re-issuing all of the affected stamps (a total of about 20 designs, including a ten-stamp set commemorating US National Parks like Yosemite,Yellowstone, the Grand Canron, Mesa Verde, and others) in 1935 as imperforate and ungummed sheets in sufficient quantity to satisfy public demand.
Gaspee Point, in Warwick RI, lies on the west side of the northern part of Narragansett Bay (which is New England’s largest estuary). In 1772, Gaspee Point was the site of one of the first acts of hostility in the American Revolution when the British Royal Navy vessel HMS Gaspee was grounded there on June 9 in what became known as the Gaspée Affair. The vessel was boarded and burned by local citizens.
Among the Royal Navy ships to which Jack Aubrey was assigned during his long fictional career, as chronicled in the novels of author Patrick O’Brian, were HMS Sophie, Polychrest, Lively, Leopard and Surprise (which he particularly loved, and later owned after its decommissioning).
The “Platonic solids” are a set of five regular, convex polyhedrons. They are all constructed from congruent (identical in size and shape), regular (all angles equal and all side equal) polygonal faces, with the same number of sides meeting at each vertex.
The five Platonic solids are the pyramid (four faces), cube (six faces), octahedron (eight faces), dodecahedron (twelve faces), and icosahedron (twenty faces). Players of Dungeons & Dragons and other roleplaying games recognize these shapes as being those of the polyhedral dice which are used in those games.
Dungeons & Dragons, designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, was first published in 1974. It quickly became, and still remains, the most popular role-playing game in history. In 2017, there were an estimated 15 million players in North America alone.
When Gygax and Arneson could not find a publisher for their ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ game in 1973, Gygax and Don Kaye founded Tactical Studies Rules – later known as TSR Hobbies – in the small resort town of Lake Geneva, in southeastern Wisconsin, to self-publish their products.
The battleship USS Wisconsin was one of the last four battleships ever built for service in the United States Navy. Her sister ships in the Iowa class were the Iowa herself, the New Jersey, and the Missouri (perhaps best known for being the site of the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II in September 1945). All four are now part of nonprofit maritime museums.
Two more warships in the class, the USS Illinois and Kentucky, were laid down but eventually cancelled and scrapped.
Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company, located on Lake Michigan in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, constructed a total of 28 submarines of the Gato and Balao class during WWII. Sometimes referred to as the ‘Freshwater Submarines’ or ‘The Manitowoc 28’, 25 of them saw combat action, with four of them still considered as being “on eternal patrol”, having been lost to enemy action.
Interestingly enough, the submarines reached the ocean via floating drydocks after having passed through the Chicago River, the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, the Illinois River, and the Mississippi River to New Orleans, as the St. Lawrence Seaway project had not yet been proposed or constructed.
On September 6th, 1962, the descent module of the Soviet spacecraft Korabl-Sputnik 1 (also referred to as “Sputnik 4” in the West) re-entered Earth’s atmosphere. While most of the 7-ton module (including a dummy cosmonaut) burned up on re-entry, a 20-pound hunk of metal made it to the Earth’s surface, and crashed into the center of 8th Street in Manitowoc, Wisconsin.
The hunk of the spacecraft was returned to the Soviet Union by American officials, but a metal ring was placed on 8th Street, marking the spot of the impact.
In his 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winning history Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, American author David Remnick wrote that, in Gorbachev’s day, “The collapse of the dream of Communist reform left the people stranded between the gulag and a McDonald’s. What could they do but order a Big Mac?”
If you want to know everything there is to know about the Big Mac, you can visit the Big Mac Museum in Irwin, PA, which tells the entire story of the burger, from inception to today. It opened in 2007 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the flagship menu item. Founded by Mike Delligatti, the son of the man who invented the Big Mac, Jim Delligatti, it showcases a timeline of the history of the burger, has lots of historic artifacts, and even a 14-foot tall sculpture, the largest of the Big Mac in the world.
The Big Mac was originally designed to be a direct competitor to the Big Boy franchise’s “Big Boy” burger. Its sale price upon release in in 1967 was US$0.45 (the equivalent of $3.49 today).
The Big Mac had two previous names, both of which failed in the marketplace: the Aristocrat, which consumers found difficult to pronounce and understand, and Blue Ribbon Burger. The third name, Big Mac, was created by Esther Glickstein Rose, a 21-year-old advertising secretary who worked at McDonald’s corporate headquarters in Oak Brook, IL.
