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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;KBBPLL, post: 26741904, member: 104064&quot;]The one thing I would consider my area of expertise is the Barber hub types and subsequent transition varieties, mostly for the 1899-1905 period. Which is pretty narrow compared to so many others who I&#039;d consider experts in a much wider area. It&#039;s still pretty crazy to me how I got there, because 7 or so years ago it wasn&#039;t anything on my radar - I was focused on Canadian George VI silver coins (still am to a certain extent). </p><p><br /></p><p>The funny thing is that my complete lack of any knowledge about Barber coinage is what enabled me to make my first discovery. There was a typical &quot;is this a counterfeit?&quot; thread on another forum about an 1895-O dime. I compared the posted images to other 1895-O dimes and noticed that the veins in the leaves on the reverse were different on the fake. This led me to resources like the short blurbs on NGC and PCGS, and I found Lawrence&#039;s guidebook online. They all said that the dime reverse changed in 1901. I must have been going year by year through the PCGS coin facts, but I noticed that the 1901 leaf veins were also the same in 1900. Did all these resources just print the wrong year? Finally I realized that they were talking about the addition of an extra fold in the right ribbon, which did occur in 1901. But nobody had ever noticed that the reverse also changed in 1900, just without the &quot;thick ribbon.&quot; </p><p><br /></p><p>I found the Barber Coin Collectors&#039; Society and contacted them, and they agreed that nobody had noticed or at least published about this. So I wrote my first ever article and had it published in the Spring 2019 BCCS journal. There was a third Barber dime reverse type used in 1900 and 1901! How had anyone not noticed in the ~40 years since John McCloskey discovered the &quot;thick ribbon&quot;?</p><p><br /></p><p>If I knew anything about the Barber dimes, I never would have made this discovery. As someone subsequently pointed out on that counterfeit thread, the obverse is clearly from 1901+, and the reverse is also the 1901+ &quot;thick ribbon&quot; reverse type. Had I already been an &quot;expert&quot;, I would have immediately recognized that the fake used obverse and reverse types that didn&#039;t exist until 1901, called it fake, and moved on. </p><p><br /></p><p>The fake that started it all:</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1707552[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>I tell the story because I think it demonstrates that a dolt can discover things and become an expert. It probably helps to not be locked into what&#039;s already known and accepted as fact, have an eye for detail, and a lot of diligence. It also helps that we live in an era where there are hundreds of high quality images online of a single year/mint/denomination. </p><p><br /></p><p>Since then I&#039;ve published I think 6 articles in BCCS. The third dime reverse type and transition anomalies for 1899 and 1900-S; discovery of a 1901-O dime with the 1892-1900 obverse (also RPD); discovery of a third Barber quarter obverse hub type only used in 1900; discovery of 1901 obverse and reverse types used for 1900-O half dollars; an article about a 1901-S &quot;authenticated&quot; fake quarter ([USER=93371]@Jack D. Young[/USER]&nbsp; also wrote about it for Coin Week); discovery of 1909 Liberty nickel &quot;beer belly B&quot; anomalies (written by [USER=3926]@justafarmer[/USER]); and co-wrote an article about 1915 counterfeit Cuban pesos. </p><p><br /></p><p>Enough horn tooting. Toot toot. Anybody can be an expert![/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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