Lucky Discoveries That Made People Rich
This man in England sets out to find a lost hammer but instead discovers a hoard of ancient gold. In the US, this family was about to lose their home, but a Superman comic book saves their lives. These are 10 lucky discoveries that made people rich.
10 Lucky discoveries that Made People Rich
Forget bank heists, hard work and late nights – sometimes all it takes is a good eye and a bit of luck.
1. The fortune under the kitchen floor
Some people search far and wide for treasure, but this family from West Dorset, England, found it right under their kitchen floor.
Back in 2019, Betty and Robert Fooks were refurbishing their 400-year-old cottage at South Poorton Farm. They wanted to lower the kitchen floor to create more ceiling height, and that’s when they discovered a broken glazed pottery bowl containing 1,000 gold and silver coins dating back to the 17th century.
Realizing the significance of their find, the family reported the discovery to a local office, who then notified the British Museum. Experts determined that the coins, now known as the Poorton Coin Hoard, were probably hidden under this family’s floorboards during the First English Civil War between 1642 and 1646, as they featured the heads of British monarchs such as Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Mary and King Charles I.
The Fooks family decided to auction these coins individually or in small groups. The total price exceeded all expectations, fetching a total of £60,740 (about $75,900). A single gold coin featuring King Charles I achieved the highest price of £5,000 (about $6,250).
This family’s routine home renovation turned out to be a life-changing event. So, we’re thinking of renovating our homes….who knows what we might find?
2. 10-pound gold nugget – the original lucky discovery
Who says the gold rush is over? One lucky prospector struck gold with a humble metal detector in Australia’s Victorian “golden triangle”, an area between Bendigo, Ballarat, and St. Arnaud, renowned for its rich gold deposits.
Armed with a modest $1,200 metal detector, the man found a massive 4.6-kilogram or 10.1-pound gold nugget buried just 12 inches underground.
Thinking it might be worth around $10,000, he brought half of it to a Gold prospecting store owned by one Darren Kamp, in Geelong, Victoria. After analyzing the gold nugget, to his and his client’s surprise, Kamp estimated it at around $100,000.
“But that’s only half of it – the other half is at home”, said the prospector!
Combined, the entire nugget contained around 83 ounces of gold, bringing its value to approximately $240,000, given the soaring gold prices at the time.
According to the Geological Survey of Victoria, there’s potentially up to 75 million ounces of undiscovered gold still hidden in the region of Ballarat, so maybe we plan a trip to Australia next month!
3. From a $20 Teapot to an $600,000 Treasure
Imagine buying a chipped, cracked teapot for just $20, only to discover it’s a priceless piece of American history worth over $800,000. Would you call that a lucky discovery?
This small porcelain teapot was in a really rough shape: broken-off handle glued together in several places, missing its lid… But the buyer felt there was something unusual…. something special about it and decided to place a modest online bid of $20 for it.
After he bought it, the man went to a renowned auction house named Wooley & Wallis for professional expertise. That’s where experts discovered the teapot was one of only 7 of known surviving pieces of porcelain produced by John Bartlam, an English potter who emigrated to America in the 1760s, becoming one of the first to produce porcelain in the colonies.
After authentication, the teapot went up for auction again with a pre-sale estimate of about $28,000. However, due to its historical significance, it triggered an intense bidding war that ended with a staggering final price of about $637,000.
Yes, that’s insane, especially for a three-inches-high roughed-up piece of pottery! So, don’t judge a pot by its cracks, right?
4. From Hole Cover to Million-Dollar Art – that’s what we call a lucky discovery
Ever thought a random flea market find could make you a millionaire? Wait ‘till you hear this story!
In the late 1990s, a man in his 30s working at a tool-and-die company in Indiana, purchased some furniture and an old painting from a local flea market for next to nothing. He obviously didn’t know anything about the artwork but liked it enough to hang it in his home and cover a hole in the wall with it. The painting depicted magnolia blossoms against a rich gold background, and its true value remained a mystery to the man for a while.
That until a January evening. While playing a board game named Masterpiece, which involves buying and selling famous artworks, the man noticed that one of the game’s cards featured a painting strikingly similar to the one on his wall, authored by 19th-century American artist, Martin Johnson Heade.
Intrigued by this, he turned to the Internet, and found that the Kennedy Galleries in Manhattan are specialized in this painter. He reached out to them via email, asking if his painting might be an authentic Heade. The gallery requested digital images, and upon reviewing them, the experts were intrigued.
But wait ’till you hear this!
Later, it was confirmed that the painting was indeed “Magnolias on Gold Velvet Cloth”, created around 1890 by Martin Johnson Heade. Remarkably, the painting was still in its original frame and in near-perfect condition.
The Kennedy Galleries authenticated the painting and facilitated its sale to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houstoun. The price was a staggering $1.25 million. So, what began as a simple flea market purchase and served as a hole cover on the hole, transformed into a life-changing moment in this man’s life.
And now, thinking about it, we’re sorry for the people that sold it at the flea market in the first place…
5. Superman to the rescue or just a lucky discovery?
Imagine being on the brink of losing your family home because you can no longer pay the mortgage. As you prepare to surrender the house to the bank, you begin sorting through the attic, going through boxes that had been untouched for years.
In the small chaos of old forgotten items, you stumble upon a collection of about 50 comic books…
This is the story of a couple from the South of the United States.
They go through the 50 comic books in their attic to find a copy of Action Comics No. 1 from 1938. What’s so special about this one is that it marked the first appearance of Superman, which makes it the “Holy Grail” of comic books.
Originally purchased for just 10 cents, its value skyrocketed over the decades. This particular copy was in remarkably good condition, increasing its potential value significantly. The couple were not very sure of what they stumbled across, but thinking it could be something of value, they reached out to Stephen Fishler, the co-owner of ComicConnect.com and Metropolis Collectibles, one of the world’s largest vintage comic book dealers.
Fishler met them in person to discuss the comic’s real value and the auction. He also convinced the bank of the comic’s worth, so the couple could keep their home until the auction was finalized, as the comic was expected to fetch more than $1.5 million, enough to save their home and also secure their financial future.
So, we could say Superman saved yet another life here!
6. From cheap frame to priceless document
Imagine buying a painting at a flea market for just $4, simply because you like the frame, and uncovering a hidden treasure worth millions.
In 1989, a man browsing a flea market in Adamstown, Pennsylvania, purchased an old, discolored painting for just $4. He wasn’t particularly interested in the artwork itself; it was the ornate frame that caught his eye.
He bought it, brought it home, and started removing the painting to repurpose the frame. That’s when he found a folded document hidden between the canvas and the backing of the painting.
He carefully unfolded this old document, to find the Declaration of Independence. He showed it to a friend first, and was encouraged to seek the opinion of an expert.
To his astonishment, the document turned out to be an original Dunlap Broadside – one of the first printed copies of the Declaration of Independence from 1776. Printed by John Dunlap in Philadelphia on the night of July 4, 1776, these broadsides were used to spread the news of America’s declaration from Great Britain throughout the thirteen colonies.
At the time of this discovery, only other 24 copies of the Dunlap Broadside were known to exist. So, the man decided to put the document up for auction.
In 1991, it was sold at Sotheby’s auction house for $2.42 million. The buyer was a private collector who understood its immense value. So, our man from Pennsylvania made a $2.4 million profit on a $4 investment.
What’s even more interesting is that the document changed hands again in 2000, when it was sold for over $8 million.
7. From lost hammer to $2.6 million
In 1992, Eric Lawes, from Suffolk, England, received a metal detector as a retirement gift.
One day, a local farmer friend asked for his help to locate a hammer he had lost somewhere in his fields. Equipped with his new gadget, Lawes ventured into the farmland with the intent to find the missing working tool for his friend.
At some point, the metal detector started to signal something strong beneath the soil. Lawes began to dig, thinking he had found his friend’s hammer. However, to his surprise, he unearthed a bunch of silver spoons, gold coins, and various other gold and silver objects. When he saw the soil wouldn’t stop giving away its riches, he stopped digging and contacted the local authorities.
The following day, archaeologists arrived on site and started to carefully excavate the ground.
The haul, now known as the Hoxne Hoard, turned out to be the largest cache of late Roman gold and silver ever discovered in Britain. It contained nearly 60 pounds (that’s 27 kilograms) of precious metals, such as more than 15,000 Roman coins, hundreds of gold jewelry, silver spoons and other valuable items dating back to the 4th and 5th centuries A.D.
For his responsible handling of the discovery, our man, Eric Lawes received the equivalent of about $2.6 million. He was fair to the end, and split the money with the farmer who owned the land where the discovery was made.
But how about the lost hammer? Lawes also found it, and, surprise! The hammer now resides in the British Museum alongside the treasure it accidentally helped discover.
What a nice story! But wait ‘till you hear the next.
8. The astonishing $2 photo found at a flea market
In 2010, while driving home from work, Randy Guijarro decided to stop by an Antique shop that was having a sale in Fresno, California. The sellers were cleaning out their storage space and needed to get rid of their “boxes of junk” with all sorts of miscellaneous items.
Looking through all these random items, Randy spotted these three tintype photographs, one depicting a group of men playing croquet. He paid $2 – the only cash he had on him – for all 3 photos.
About a week later, drawn to the composition of the croquet photograph, he examined it under a microscope at home and noticed something interesting. One of the men in the photograph looked a lot like Billy the kid, the infamous outlaw of the Wild West.
Excited about the find, Randy and his wife, Linda, began researching Billy the kid and his gang, the Regulators. The faces they found on the internet matched those in the photograph.
Over the next 5 years, the couple embarked on the difficult journey of authenticating the photograph. Their work paid off when a California-based firm specializing in rare coins and historical artifacts authenticated the tintype as only the second confirmed photograph of Billy the Kid ever discovered. Its value was set at $5 million.
9. From kitchen decor to $26 million masterpiece
Imagine cooking your daily meals, eating with your family, or unpacking groceries near a painting worth millions, completely unaware of its true value.
That’s exactly what happened to an elderly French woman who discovered that the small piece of artwork hanging in her kitchen was a lost 13th-century masterpiece.
In 2019, as the woman was preparing to move out of her old house and into a retirement home, she had an auctioneer evaluate her furniture and belongings. Among them was this small painting of just 10 by 8 inches, depicting a religious scene. The woman believed it was just a simple Greek religious icon and hung it in her kitchen without thinking too much about it.
When the auctioneer saw the painting, she was immediately struck by its quality and suspected it might be something special, and valuable. So she recommended that the woman have it evaluated by an art expert. That’s when they discovered the piece was actually painted by a renowned Florentine painter named Cimabue, or Cenni di Pepo – one of the pioneering figures of the Italian Renaissance, born around 1240.
At the time of the discovery, only 11 other works by this painter were known worldwide, and none has ever been sold at a public auction.
However, in October 2019, the painting was put up for auction, and it sold for a staggering $26.8 million.
This incredible windfall transformed the elderly woman’s life overnight.
10. This man almost melted $33 million
A man from the Midwest bought a gold egg at a flea market for $14,000. He thought that if he melted it down for scrap gold, he could make a small profit of around $500. However, the egg’s gold content wasn’t as valuable as he had anticipated, leaving him in a tight spot.
One night, in a moment of desperation, he decided to research the egg online. He typed “egg Vacheron Constantin”, the name engraved on the clock inside the egg. To his surprise, he found an article from the Daily Telegraph about this “Imperial Easter Egg” thing. According to the article, the egg was crafted by this famous jeweler named Peter Carl Faberge for the royal family of Russia. It was estimated to be worth $33 million and had been missing since 1964.
Imagine being in this man’s shoes, hoping to be in the possession of such a rare and expensive thing, but afraid that it might all be just a dream. Nevertheless, the man contacted Faberge expert Kieran McCarthy from London.
Upon inspection, McCarthy confirmed the egg was the long-lost Third Imperial Egg, created in 1887 as an Easter gift from Tsar Alexander III to his wife.
The egg was indeed a masterpiece of craftsmanship. While the man overestimated the value of the egg’s raw materials – worth about the $14,000 he paid – he had really underestimated its worth as a work of art and historical artifact.
The egg was eventually sold to a private collector for an undisclosed sum, but it’s believed to be around the $33 million mark.
From nearly melting down a historic treasure for scrap to becoming a multi-millionaire, this man’s story is proof to the incredible surprises that can be hidden in plain sight.