Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. We've all mailed a letter or two in our lifetime. Most of us understand that sending a letter has certain costs attached to it, like paying the mail carriers and the people whose sort and organize it all. So there's a fee attached to
each letter literally. In fact, since the forties, people have paid for the privilege to mail a letter by purchasing stamps. One beautiful spring morning, a man named Bill Robbie left the post office with a sheet of stamps. There were one hundred of them altogether, and he'd paid a whopping
twenty four hours for the lot of them. They were pretty too, with a bright red border on a background of sky blue, and right there in the middle of the frame, flanked by the value of the stamp and a large US Postage banner across the top was an airplane. They were hot off the presses and were sort of a commemorative stamp, so to speak. You see the airplane featured in the artwork was meant to represent a historic flight that was about to take place that very same day.
The Postal Service was about to enter the era of airmail, transporting mail over hundreds of miles with the help of airplanes. It was a very big deal. In fact, when the flight took place the next day, President Woodrow Wilson showed up to watch it. The plane was flown from Washington, d c. All the way to New York, and despite some early engine troubles, the flight finally took off under the guidance of Lieutenant George Boyle. The plane, by the way,
was a Curtis Model j N four. J N of course, sounds a lot like jen which is why most people called them Jenny's, and that Jenny took off. It vanished over the horizon anyway. The day before, when Bill Robbie took those stamps home, he noticed something odd about them. The entire sheet appeared to have been printed incorrectly. The plane in the middle of each tiny frame was flying upside down, the product of a simple printing error involving
a reversed plate. Most importantly, though they were rare. In fact, only nine of those upside down sheets were printed before the mistake was fixed, making them extremely valuable. I think most people have seen them before too. These stamps are a textbook example of how manufacturing errors can turn a common object into something that's incredibly desired to collectors. And let me tell you, these things were desirable. Bill ended up selling his twenty four dollar sheet a week later
four fifteen thousand dollars. The man who bought it sold it a week later for twenty tho dollars. From there, the prices just skyrocketed over the years. The sheet was separated into blocks to sell off one or two stamps at a time, and by the nineteen sixties, a single stamp price was in the tens of thousands of dollars. By the nineteen eighties, one stamp would run you nearly
two hundred thousand dollars. In May of two thousand sixteen, the old Inverted Jenny set a new record with a single stamp selling at auction for nearly one point two million dollars. And honestly, I can't help but wonder at the power of rarity and time to make something as small as a postage stamp become worth more than a million bucks. It's crazy for sure, but it's not the craziest part of this story. These stamps were released on May tenth of nineteen eighteen, just a few days ahead
of the flight they were meant to commemorate. On May fifteenth. The crowd gathered to watch the plane take off and then watched it slowly disappear in the distance, except headed in the wrong direction. It was supposed to fly north, but instead headed south. The pilot, George Boyle, blamed it on a broken compass when he called his boss for help.
You see, it turns out he had landed somewhere in Maryland and needed someone to come and get him and the plane, and not just landed, Boyle actually crashed landed that jenny, which was a bit more embarrassing. The plane had crashed in a cornfield, and to be honest, it was a miracle that Boile survived to talk about it later. And that's because of the position the plane ended up in. It was upside down. Alan was born in Scotland in the early eight hundreds and from the very beginning life
was rough. His neighborhood in Glasgow was known for its poverty and crime, making it very difficult to break outside of that pattern, but Alan tried. His father passed away before he turned ten, causing him to enter the workforce to help support his family. As he grew and worked over the years, though, he encountered new ideas and movements, one of which was known as chartis Um. It was a mid nineteenth century reform movement in Britain that called
for better rights for the working class. It wasn't a bad thing. At its core. The Chartist movement was demanding better voting rights and representation in a government that had been a bit too inaccessible for a very long time. But like all big movements, there were some who took things too far. Violent protests and demonstrations led to arrest warrants for a number of Chartists, and Alan's name was among them. To avoid arrest, Alan hit out at the
home of friends for months. In April of eighteen forty two, though those friends managed to sneak him aboard a ship that was headed to the United States. For a long while, he seemed to be safe until that is, the ship was wrecked off the coast of Nova Scotia. Thankfully, though Alan survived. He eventually made his way to the Chicago area, where he set up life in a Scottish community known as Dundee. Alan was safe there. He had left his
troubled past behind anovated the authorities. He might have had a price on his head back home, but in America he was a freeman. All he needed to do now was keep a low profile and everything would be all right. Five years after moving to Dundee, though, something happened to change that. Alan had rode out to a small island in the middle of the Fox River to cut some
timber and encountered evidence of a large campsite. It was unusual enough that Alan returned to town and told the sheriff about it, and together they set up watch to see who might be using the island and for what. When they discovered who it was, the sheriff was astounded. All known counterfeit operation had been using the island for gatherings in between crimes, and thanks to Alan, all of
them were captured and taken to jail. The sheriff was more than grateful for Alan's help and made the young man a deputy as a reward. Within two years, Alan had moved to Chicago, where he joined the police force. There he was good at his job and had an eye for details that no one else seemed to have. Before long, he became Chicago's first official detective. His career would become something of a legend. Hated by criminals, he
was plagued by assassination attempts for years. A decade after arriving in Chicago, though, it was another man's assassination that Alan managed to stop. A group of people had planned to kill newly elected President Abraham Lincoln as he was traveling to Washington, d C. For his inauguration. Alan managed to stop it. Though he went on to build a business around his skills. He of the official police force and became a freelancer, offering his private investigation services to
anyone who needed them. His reputation became so great that when the Department of Justice needed to supplement their team of investigators in eighteen seventy one, they hired Allen's company. It's all a bit ironic, isn't it. A man who fled his homeland to avoid arrest for criminal activities ended up becoming the premier detective of the nineteenth century. His team helped track down the notorious serial killer H. H. Holmes. They toppled the largest New York crime syndicate of the
day and did battle with the outlaw Jesse James. Most people today would recognize Alan's company if they heard the name, because it's so unusual. And that's not Allan's fault though, because as far back as he was concerned, he did the logical thing and named the business after himself. As a result, his surname has become synonymous with the concept of a detective agency, the Pinkerton's. I hope you've enjoyed
today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.