Question about gaps in sequencial serial numbers

Yes, however I've been reading. I don't recall exactly where in my many searches, but this is my current understanding:

(1928-1934) There are multiple times along the printing process where "things" are checked for "adherence". If non-adherence is observed BEFORE the serial numbers are printed on the bills, those sheets are simply removed from production and no allowances are made. If however, non-adherence is observed after the serial numbers have been printed, many additional things have to happen (formal destruction, quantity captured and replaced with stars, etc.). Discarding bills after the serial numbers have been printed does indeed happen. How often? Hard to tell from my research. What happens to the actual serial numbers that were printed on those bills? Best I can tell, they are not reused and therefore those serial numbers never exist in the real world.

In my searches, I ran across this forum and begin reading. It seems like you have some very knowledgeable people who could shed definitive light on my questions.

 

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Remember, I'm not interested in the way things happen today. I'm only interested in how things happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

 

It's not much different. A little faster... but the process of numbering and the stacking of the sheets (which I think is what you are referring to) are the same. I'm not sure if they do star notes and replacements the same way today... I'll have to defer to one of the more advanced currency guys on that one.

 

Perhaps you are correct (that star bills are put in the actual place in the run where the destroyed bills would have resided), however, the sense I get is that is not true. Star bills were simply used as replacement for overall quantity rather than a specific bundle. Not only that, but try to imagine the incredible time/manpower that would be required to physically place star bills in an exact spot in a run.

 

you need to talk with numbers. he is the resident expert on printing of notes. he can probably shed some light on the situation. if you do an advanced search on some of his posts it might give you the answer you are looking for. i think all of the others including myself can merely lend there own speculation.

 

Before I even registered I was searching through this forum looking for my answer. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything relevant for Gap, Sequence, Serial Numbers.

Perhaps Mr. Numbers will find my little thread.

BTW, I've got a call into BEP historical division, but they have not called back. I'm not holding my breath so don't worry about me keeling over and collapsing.

 

Yes, if serial number 01234567 was replaced by a star, then you'd find the star at that exact spot, right between 01234566 and 01234568. This was true in the early 20th century and is still true today. (But note that it's false for some other countries' currency--Canada for example now uses "top-up" notes just the way you describe, sticking in all the replacements at the end to top-up the run to its full quantity.)

You're correct that a serial number which has been replaced by a star note is not reused in that series.

There have been *large* variations over time in the frequency of printing defects which require replacement by star notes. Nowadays, about 0.5% of all notes are replaced by stars (1 in 200). The 1934 $5's had a replacement rate of around 1.1% (1 in 90). The rates got crazy high in the '50s and '60s when the BEP was first getting used to dry-intaglio printing: better than 10% of all 1957 $1 silver certificates were stars!

In the '30s, when the quantity of currency printed was much lower than it is today, every single note would've been hand-inspected, so replacing defective notes by stars wouldn't've been too much trouble. It was much faster than the older system, used before 1910, of replacing every defective note with a specially prepared reprint carrying the *same* serial number as the original! Today, the replacement process is largely automated, as the printed sheets are inspected by machine and only spot-checked by human inspectors. (The automated inspection was introduced in the '70s, with the result that an unusually large number of major errors got out in Series 1974 while the system was being fine-tuned....)

For efficiency reasons, the BEP no longer uses single star notes to replace single error notes. They either replace an entire sheet by a sheet of stars (if the error is caught before the sheets are cut), or an entire strap of 100 notes by a strap of stars (if the error is caught in the final inspection before the notes are shrink-wrapped and sent out). But the stars still end up in exactly the spot formerly filled by the defective notes they're replacing.

Although we can't be sure, it's still entirely possible that your four "missing" serial numbers never left the BEP. They might've been replaced by star notes, and then someone might've pulled those star notes out of the pile at some point. Few people were collecting currency at the time these notes were issued, so the removal of the stars would've presumably been done at a later time--perhaps one of your ancestors showed the notes to a collector buddy (at some point after collecting paper became popular in the '60s), and ended up selling the much-more-valuable star notes while keeping the common notes for their sentimental value.

Or perhaps not. I *strongly* doubt that any collector has rifled through the $1's in the scan you posted, because the last two notes pictured form a changeover pair (consecutive serials with different series/signatures). Anybody pulling out the more valuable notes would surely have grabbed that pair...so the missing 17 notes probably just went their separate way in the banking system before this batch of notes ended up in your great-uncle's hands.

 

Numbers why is it in those scans that the 1,2 and 4 are all A' and that 3rd is a B even though the Serials are in order. I don't understand why that one B with the different signature is in the middle of those?

 

Thanks for stopping by Mr. Numbers.

Could you please elaborate on this. I do notice that eventhough they are in sequence, they represent two different series. Is that rare/valuable?

How could such a thing happen? Wouldn't a different series create a different lot (ie, B...B)?

 

I have another question, if you could be so kind. Do the serial numbers of the star note replacements have any relationship at all to the serial numbers they replaced?

If not, it's entirely possible that I rearranged the star notes out as I was grouping according to the run. A star note would have seemed in the "wrong" spot if its serial number had nothing in common with the run. BTW, I've got a gob of star notes as well.

Whatdoyouknow, the star notes I have may have been the missing sequence notes.

I know it is difficult to believe, but it is highly unlikely that any of these bills have been removed, touched or even looked at between the time my great uncle got them and the time I personally touched them.

 

It definitely adds a substantial amount to the value. I'm not familiar enough with the older series to give you a price estimate, but it's a significant multiple of what a consecutive pair with matching series would be worth.

Back in the old days, the BEP didn't segregate its printing plates by series or signatures; as long as the currency design itself hadn't changed, all the plates were considered interchangeable. Each intaglio printing press used several plates in rotation (one is inked while another is printing while another is cleaned off before the next pass...), and during a changeover from one signature combination to the next, it was entirely possible that some of the plates on a press would have different signatures than other plates on the same press. When the resulting stack of sheets was sent through the serialling press, the result was changeover pairs like yours, as the serial sequence kept switching back and forth between one signature combination and the other. (If you've got more consecutive notes after the ones in the photo, check them and see if there are more changeovers...where there's one, there are likely to be several.)

At the time, changeover pairs were probably scarce but not rare--if you worked at a bank and had access to lots of new currency, they wouldn't've been too hard to find. But as I mentioned before, there were essentially no currency collectors in those days. So nobody was saving pairs like this at the time; the only ones that have survived are those that happened to be included in consecutive runs of notes that were saved for other reasons, such as the ones you've got.

Since the '50s, the BEP hasn't mixed signature combinations this way, so changeover pairs are no longer printed. For several decades, the convention was to begin the serial numbering of each series at the number where the previous series had left off. More recently, each series just begins back at 00000001.

 

Nope, they would've been completely unrelated. That was the whole point of introducing star notes, in 1910: Under the old system, every single replacement note was individually printed with the same serial number as the error note it was replacing, which was a lot of trouble. Star notes, with an independent sequence of serial numbers, can be prepared in advance and simply used as needed, whenever an error note is found.

Estimates like this can be pretty fuzzy, but...the observed serial range for 1934C $5 silver certificates runs from about L5xxxxxxxA to Q6xxxxxxxA, so your notes in the N843xxxxxA range fall a bit more than halfway through. The stars for that series range from about *11xxxxxxA to *17xxxxxxA, so if you've got four stars with serials in the neighborhood of *14xxxxxxA, they're probably the four missing notes.

 

Actually I've got many note runs in 35a, 35b, 35c, and 35d. Many of those runs have missing serials (breaks the run up into 2/3 separate runs). I now have a stack of stars.

Is there any value in trying to determine which star fills which hole (even if that's possible)?

 

Ohhhh.....

Numbers - I will email you...

 

Eh...what?

Runs of 333-1/3 sheets (4000 notes) and 666-2/3 sheets (8000 notes) were printed, but they didn't cause any serials to be omitted from the sequence. There was just a net wastage of 12 notes every time a run didn't end at a serial that was a multiple of 12.

E.g., if the first run is one brick, 333-1/3 sheets, then the BEP actually prints 334 sheets, and numbers them 00000001 to 00004008. The extra eight notes are destroyed, and the 4000 notes are shipped out. If the next run is supposed to be two more bricks, 666-2/3 sheets, then it's printed as 667 sheets, and numbered 00003997 to 00012000. This time the four extra notes to be destroyed fall at the *beginning* of the run, because that's where they have to go in order to make the plate positions work out (serial 00004001 belongs in position E, not A, so the run has to start four serials too low). Overall result: the BEP had to print 12,012 notes in order to get 12,000 notes issued, but the issued notes are still numbered from 00000001 to 00012000 with no gaps or duplications.

 

What are the face and back plate serials on the N84310311A and N84310316A notes?

 

N84310311A = front c1935
N84310316A = front b1909

Didn't record backs

Once I get answers on the questions I asked in my other thread, I plan on going through them all and recording additional info.

 

Funny you should ask about front plates. Today I was looking at the relationship between sequential numbers and front plates to try and figure out what was going on. It's like a dinner party game trying to make sense of it.

At times during a run it seems to make sense and then at other times it seems like they cut the sheets and let the pieces blow around for awhile before regathering and applying serial numbers. Either that or they were changing front plates on whims.

 

BTW, does anybody know how to insert an excel table into a post so that I can show you guys?

 

1934c q05848301a e1967
1934c q05848302a f1967
1934c q05848303a a1961
1934c q05848304a b1961
1934c q05848305a c1961
1934c q05848306a d1961
1934c q05848307a e1961
1934c q05848308a f1961
1934c q05848309a a1961
1934c q05848310a b1961
1934c q05848311a c1961
1934c q05848312a d1961
1934c q05848313a e1961
1934c q05848314a f1961
1934c q05848316a b1961
1934c q05848317a c1961
1934c q05848318a d1961
1934c q05848319a e1961
1934c q05848320a f1961
1934c q05848321a a1944
1934c q05848322a b1944
1934c q05848323a c1944
1934c q05848324a d1944
1934c q05848325a e1944
1934c q05848326a f1944
1934c q05848328a b1961
1934c q05848329a c1961
1934c q05848330a d1961
1934c q05848331a e1961
1934c q05848332a f1961
1934c q05848333a a1941
1934c q05848334a b1941
1934c q05848335a c1941
1934c q05848336a d1941
1934c q05848337a e1941
1934c q05848339a a1967
1934c q05848340a b1967
1934c q05848341a c1967
1934c q05848342a d1967
1934c q05848343a e1967
1934c q05848346a b1918
1934c q05848347a c1918

Hopefully this can be read.
YearSeries/Serial number/front plate