1919 Mercury Dime DDO Discovery Piece

Greetings,

Last week I posted a peculiar 1919-P Mercury Dime on the PCGS and NGC Message Boards.

The pictures have been reviewed by most of the "Experts", and has been in-hand with Bill Fivaz, who verified it's a DDO. It still has a few stops with CONECA, then off to ANACS for the discovery piece slabbing. It will likely be in the next volume of the CPG.

Tom DeLorey is working on the press releases for various publications, which should be out shortly.

The numbers are NOT set in stone yet, but will likely be

CPG: FS-101
CONECA: DDO-001

The biggest of the original threads can be found here:
http://forums.collectors.com/messageview.cfm?catid=26&threadid=937347

There are several pictures in that thread, but here are a few to give you an idea what it looks like. As of right now, 2 other specimens (higher grade than my F-12) have been located and are also on their way to Bill Fivaz for photos as well.




So... until the articles make this a bit more mainstream, have fun cherrypicking shows and shops

If anyone finds one, I would be interested to hear about it as well.

Thank You
Jeff

 

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Congratulations Jeff. Nice find!

 

WONDERFUL!

 

How the heck did no one find this for 96 years?

amazing

 

Nice find, and thanks for posting it here so we can all go out searching for more

 

Congrats on the discovery piece, it is a very dramatic one too. Most people on here only think they have a rare doubled die but it is almost always MD, that is not the case with you. Congrats again on that, did you buy it advertised as a doubled die or did you discover it on the coin after you bought it?

 

I know right - seems impossible. This one has sat in an oddity box for anywhere from 20-27 years.


For 1919-P's, they used 521 Obverse Dies striking 37,017,050 pieces - averaging 71,050 dimes per die. The final acceptable production numbers was 35,740,000.

HUGE assumptions here (basically meaningless, but to put things in perspective) - if this DDO was restricted to one working die, an average production of 71,000 could have been made, but... 1,277,050 dimes were deemed defective in the whole run and were returned to the M&R Department for melting into new coinage ingots.

If this was that visible to the naked eye, imagine how many of the 71k might have been included in the 1.28M rejects. Even more likely is the die did not finish a full production run/life as it was probably spotted while still in-use, but again... all speculation.

Thanks to Roger Burdette for the Mint Reports/info above.

 

I bought a bulk box of several hundred oddities not knowing exactly what was in there. (Was one of those - go through these and let me know what you're interested in and give me a price type of deal). The box had a ton of machine doubling pieces, poor man's 55 DD, deteriorated die anomalies, and other bogus oddities, but a lot of true RPMs, overdates, known doubled dies, small mechanical errors, and other varieties.

This discovery certainly raised the price of the box.

Sadly, the past owner doesn't even remember it being in there, if it was something he bought as-is and threw in the box, or saw the doubling and set it aside himself, etc. He thinks it could have been in his box as far back as 1988.

Tom wrote the article to get his name in it as well for some recognition though.

 

I am still amazed that a DDO of that magnitude escaped detection for this long. Congrats on the find!

 

That is a really dramatic DDO. Like Frank, I'm amazed that no other specimen has been discovered in all this time. Congratulations!

Chris

 

FYI - just a quick update: Specimen #3 turned out to not be a match. #2 is stuck in the Postal System, but Bill Fivaz should get it tomorrow. We're fairly certain it will be a match due to the detailed description the owner and Tom DeLorey went through trying to confirm it's a match before sending it out.

Just curious if anyone has gone through their inventory and cherrypicked themselves yet or found one otherwise?

 

Not only do I NOT have one of these, I don't even have a 1919 Mercury Dime.

But I'll be on the lookout...

 

That's a real nice DDO! It must be pretty scarce to evade detection until now. I'll keep my eye out for that one.

 

Is Specimen #3 a different variety? Sometimes, when someone discovers a variety and publishes it, people start looking and find a whole bunch of similar-but-different ones. The same thing happened to me when I discovered the 1951 Franklin DDR-005 (after which another 6 or 7 similar varieties have been discovered)

 

In this case, Specimen #3 was machine doubling on the left part of IGWT.

With all the sets of eyes looking at 1919s right now, there has been a 2nd potential Doubled Die identified (Not as radical as this one, more the thickened motto type) but it is waiting to be in-hand for the purchaser to confirm.

 

It goes to prove there are plenty of errors out there - Awesome find! Congrats!

 

Send it to PCGS or NGC to get it labeled as a discovery piece. Again, it is very surprising that a DDO of that severity was never discovered. Congrats!!

 

Jeff, where did you get that?

 

PCGS/NGC will only recognize them if it's in books/reference - since this won't for awhile, CONECA usually sends discovery pieces to ANACS with a letter to get them certified as discovery pieces (where I couldn't do that with PCGS/NGC). ANACS already reached out to me and it will be going there once the CONECA folks are done with their documentation.

It was in a box of oddities bought from another collector.

 

Wow, I thought something like that. How interesting. Real good find!