An Error
The most famous Canal Zone stamp was the four cent stamp (Scott #157, error stamp #157a), issued on October 12, 1962, for the opening of the Thatcher Ferry Bridge (now the Bridge of the Americas), the first elevated bridge connecting the two sides of the Canal. One pane of fifty stamps was released without the silver ink used to depict the Bridge. Upon learning of this, Canal Zone postal officials proposed to release a large quantity of intentional errors, to destroy the value of the errors. This would have paralleled what was done at almost the same time for the U.S. four cent stamp showing Dag Hammarskjöld--some stamps had been issued with an inverted background, and to destroy their value, the United States Post Office Department, within a month of the original release, issued millions more. Publicity and a lawsuit by stamp dealer H.E. Harris, who was in possession of some of the errors, and claimed that the new release would effectively destroy their value prevented the release of the Canal Zone intentional errors.
Read more about this topic: Postage Stamps And Postal History Of The Canal Zone
Famous quotes containing the word error:
“Children, then, acquire social skills not so much from adults as from their interactions with one another. They are likely to discover through trial and error which strategies work and which do not, and later to reflect consciously on what they have learned.”
—Zick Rubin (20th century)
“It is personality with a penny’s worth of talent. Error which chances to rise above the commonplace.”
—Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)