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Topic Last Updated on 09-07-2024
Rare and Expensive
Coins: Shaping History and Economy Through the Ages.
How many different precious metals do you know? Of course, three will quickly come to mind: gold, silver, and platinum. This list, though, ought to include iridium, osmium, palladium, rhodium, and ruthenium — all of whose main practical quality is corrosion resistance. Unlike iron that rusts and copper that turns green, gold and silver are able to resist aggression from oxygen and retain their marketable appearances. Therefore, it’s only natural that these precious metals, rare and difficult to extract, have long served as the measure of the value of goods.
The prominent American economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman considered the main coin metal in history to be “silver, not gold.” Indeed, when compared with gold, silver money is issued more often by an order of magnitude. In addition, the gold coins of antiquity and the early Middle Ages were actually made of electrum, a naturally-occurring gold-silver alloy, in which the silver content could reach 50 %.
Silver in the form of nuggets has been found across almost all regions where great civilizations once stood. Anatolia, the Greek mines of Laurion, Iberia, and Carthage is a short list of silver suppliers in the ancient world. It wasn’t easy to extract silver everywhere, so its supply could never increase dramatically. This restriction served as a reliable basis for commodity exchange, but sometimes this balance was broken, and real economic crises broke out.
Maritime routes for the export of precious metals
For example, Spain in the 16th century was nearly the sole owner of the richest deposits of silver in Mexico and Bolivia, from which the Treasury of the Empire was abundantly replenished. It reached the point that over 90 % of all transported goods from overseas were silver bars. The effect of these treasures, though, was unexpected: historians call this the “Spanish Price Revolution.”
The uncontrolled increase in the supply of silver disrupted the relationship between the number of goods on the market and the precious metal. As a result, silver began to rapidly devalue, which led to an even more rapid increase in prices. Economists call this inflation. In such circumstances, producers of goods aren’t able to plan, and buyers can’t afford goods because prices increase faster than their income. This price revolution undermined the economy of the Spanish superpower, and its golden age became a copper one. Therefore, the type of money itself is not as important as the complex interactions that arise when it is circulated in the economy.
The World’s Biggest Coin
The largest coin ever created by man weighed 2,231 lb. This coin, the so-called Australian Gold Nugget, was minted for a whole year-and-a-half by the Australian Perth Mint and introduced in October 2011. The reason for its release was a meeting of the heads of state of the British Commonwealth — a union composed of Great Britain and its former dominions, colonies, and dependencies.
On the obverse (front) side of the coin was a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, the formal head of Australia, and on the reverse (back) side was a large red kangaroo. At a nominal value of AUD $1 million, a coin with a diameter of 31 in and a thickness of 4.7 in is worth over 35 million pounds sterling.
Behind this unique Australian coin stand the former record holders in this regard — the 220-lb Canadian Big Maple Leaf with a value of CAD $1 million (diameter: 21 in, thickness: 1 in), and the 68.6-lb Austrian “Big Phil” with a denomination of €100,000, issued in October 2004 in only 15 copies. In comparison with the Gold Nugget, though, they seem rather modest.
Things Have to Get Worse Before They Get Better
Interestingly, for some reason, the Spanish kings didn’t resort to a time-old royal approach to fixing things: a deliberate reduction in the share of precious metal in coins. This was widely practiced in Rome. In this way, under Emperor Nero, the daily salary of a legionary — a silver denarius originally weighing 4.5 g—“slimmed down” to a mere 3.8 g. Emperor Gallienus began producing denarius from an alloy of silver and copper (a so-called master alloy), and Aurelian was able to achieve a silver content of only 2%, nearly turning the denarius into a copper coin.
There was another way to reduce expenditure on silver — by trimming down the coin. This worked especially well if the coin was shaped irregularly. Just pinch off a barely noticeable crumb and, with a circulation numbering in the thousands of copies, you’ll be able to save on materials considerably!
This method was successfully employed not only by rulers but also by fraudsters. A solution to this problem, which we still use today, was proposed by Isaac Newton: the edges of coins are finished with reeding, ridges, or inscriptions on the surface sides.
Main types of coin edges
Coins | Minting Means Stamping
It’s well-known that precious metals are plastic and melt at temperatures around 1800 °F. Contrary to expectations, though, the main technology involved in coin making was not casting (used more often by counterfeiters) but minting. However, no one sat hammering away at each individual coin: things were done in a much more high-tech sort of way. The master coin maker placed a molded, heated tablet on a bronze stamp, making a sort of “negative” of the obverse. Then, a top stamp was applied to make a “sandwich,” a three-dimensional model of the reverse, and the process was completed with a strong hammer blow. All that was left was to shake out the coin and check it for defects.
Bronze stamps for minting wore out quickly. Therefore, antique coins are quite different from each other, even though their differences in age may be only a matter of days.
Minting Techniques and Anti-Counterfeiting Measures
Minting allowed for relief transfer of small ornamental details and, to a certain extent, protected the coins from the possibility of forgery. For example, counterfeit coins were characterized by a porous surface due to an abundance of cavities (empty spaces formed by air bubbles), a lack of small details, liquid metal filling, and other features. Moreover, tin and lead were often added to the alloy, so a forgery could be detected by its softness — this is where we got the tradition of checking the veracity of coins by biting them.
