This is part of a series of blog posts I wrote for a coin collecting site circa ~2015 that seems to have disappeared off the Internet. Note any prices mentioned in this series are from 2015.
We like to think of US Mint personnel as intrepid perfectionists. These are people whose ties are tied with the same knot every day and who come to a full, complete stop at every stop sign, right? But the fact is, they’re human like anybody else. They make mistakes. there’s quality control measures in place of course, but the quality control people make mistakes.
And when mistakes happen, collectors rejoice, because a new remarkable collector’s item is out there in the wild. You might have heard of the infamous 1942 Mercury dime date overstrike or the 1913 Liberty nickel, but here’s some less well-known errors you might have in your collection already…
1883 Racketeer Nickel
The year 1883 was the first year of the Liberty Head ‘V’ nickel, and it was also the year the US Mint learned an important lesson about common sense. See, the original nickel reverse design had no sense – well, ‘cents’ that is. It just had the Roman numeral ‘V’ on it to designate the denomination. Earlier three-cent coins had been produced likewise with only the Roman numeral. People would know that it stood for cents, right?
Well, a few con artists noticed that the nickel was very close in size to a five dollar gold piece, so they painted the 1883 Liberty Head nickel with an electroplating and passed it off as a five dollar Liberty gold coin. Later fraudsters even reeded the edge to help it pass. Shop keepers would absently make five dollars change for it without realizing the deception. Discovery of this practice brought production to a halt, while designer Charles Barber modified the design to include the word ‘cents.’ But in this case, you can’t fault the Mint for thinking that people couldn’t be that gullible…
2008 Reverse of 2007 Silver Eagle
The Burnished 2008-W Silver Eagle series gave us the very first variation in the history of Silver Eagles. About 46,000 of the total mintage of 533,757 were produced with the reverse design from 2007 rather than the slightly modified 2008 reverse. Examine the reverse of a 2008-W Burnished Silver Eagle; the most telling difference is a sans-serif ‘U’ in ‘United’ rather than a serif ‘U’. The secondary tell is a slightly squished dash between the words ‘silver’ and ‘one’.
The number of pieces produced shouldn’t be taken as gospel, since the error was only recognized by the later discovery of 15 reverse-side dies with the old 2007 design still in use. And West Point Mint had a very good excuse for their mistake – besides the dies looking so similar, 2008 was the beginning of the precious metals investment rush following the US Recession. Unprecedented demand had groggy Mint employees pulling late shifts.
1878 7/8 Tailfeather Morgan Dollar
The year 1878 was a haphazard one for the Morgan dollar series. For once, Mint employees minding the production line could escape blame, because the fault was found with the coin design itself. Designer George T. Morgan, it seems, took so much care with the obverse design that he apparently messed up on the eagle’s tail-feathers on the reverse. Now Morgan was a British import, mind, so you can’t blame him for not knowing that until that time, all eagles had been depicted with an odd number of tail feathers on US coinage.
Mint director Henry Linderman wasted no time in rushing the coin design out for 1878 issue, only to call a halt as soon as the planchets began rolling. That’s when the design flaw was pointed out, and furthermore the arrows clutched in the eagle’s talon have an optical illusion where the multiple arrow heads on one side don’t match up with the feathered ends on the other side, making an arrow appear bent or half missing. So the new design was created, with 7 tail feathers instead of 8, and with the arrows adjusted. Fine, but some confusion happened and the correction was carved into the dies themselves rather than cast new dies. The result is that several version of 1878 Morgan dollars exist, with 7, 8, or 8 over 7 tail feathers and the arrows sort of a hallucinogenic blur. But what do you expect? It was 1878; they didn’t have Internet or Photoshop to work with.
1943 Copper Cent
Now, to look at a 1943 penny, you’d never spot the problem. It contains no visible errors. It takes a minute to register the problem. The unusual defect is that some 1943 pennies are bronze. And the 1943 pennies were supposed to be steel.
The year 1943 was in the thick of WWII, naturally, and rationing meant that the typical bronze planchet of the familiar wheat-ears Lincoln cent would be replaced by a shiny steel substitute. Except that a few bronze strikes made it through anyway. This error was repeated again in 1944, when the Mint was supposed to switch back to bronze but still struck a few steelies anyway. Many errors are present in Mint issues right around WWII. They were short of staff, after all.
2000 Sacagawea Mule
It was a new century, a new millennium, and a brand new dollar coin rolling out of the mint for circulation. The Sacagawea dollar was a striking specimen in sparkling manganese brass, with a soaring eagle reverse and famous Lewis & Clark native American guide George Washington on the obverse…. Hey, wait a minute…
There are errors and then there are errors. The quarter-fronted 2000 Sacagawea dollar – also known as a ‘mule’ – is to Mint errors what the Hinderburg is to blimp disasters. When the mules were discovered, investigations were conducted. Superiors were called to the offices of higher superiors, desks were pounded, heads rolled. Some of the mules were pulled before they made it out the door, but 10 specimens so far have been discovered in the wild.
And no, there was no excuse this time. Somebody just goofed. Hey, we have quarters and dollars going on here, this is confusing stuff!
