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Last month's Quest asked for the identity of two items.
Both were examples of U. S. money.
The first was the new $50 bill, changed in 1997 to make
counterfeiting more difficult with a new picture of Grant ("face lift" or,
as Jeff Klein notes, "giving Grant a big head"), a microprint of
the United States below his beard, and an imbedded plastic strip
which shows yellow under ultraviolet ("black") light.
Other denominations give different colors.
Counterfeit detector pens use iodine to detect the starch
in counterfeit paper bills, which turns black, while the high rag
content of real bills will not react.
The second Quest item is the 1933 Double Eagle $20 gold piece ordered destroyed when the U. S. went off the gold standard that year. Ten coins escaped into private hands, of which all but one were found and destroyed. The remaining one surfaced in 1996 or 1997 and was sold at auction at Sothebys in New York on July 30th, 2002 (coincidentally, the mailing date of last month's Col-M.) Jeff Wolfe noted the sale price was 7.95 million dollars, tagging it as the world's most valuable coin.
Correct answers came from
Alma Litten,
Delmar Burkitt,
Jeff Klein,
Kevin Skehan (1 of 2),
and
Jeff Wolfe.
Nick Wolfe suggested an idea for Quest based on a game created by linguist Charles K. Ogdon, looking for surnames of famous persons ending in "on" or "off". But you only score for names not in a standard encyclopedia. Sounds like a good parlor game, but won't work well for Quest. However, Nick's suggestion did give me an idea which would work for the September Quest. You must collect as many surnames of famous persons which contain any two different letters of the three letters X, Y, and Z, but not starting with any of those two letters. (For example, Gozzi and Zworykin would not qualify but Bexley would). Come up with as many as possible, but at least three others. Identify them by full name and why they are famous. Send answers by September 18th to Dick Nuenke; 1460 Kingsgate Rd.; Columbus, OH 43221 or call in to 614-326-0452; fax to 614-292-4118; or e-mail to rnuenke@columbus.rr.com. |
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