Coins Daily

The first thing you will notice when looking at the pictures of this coin are the eastern characters punched into its surface. No, these were not part of the original design! They were added by assayers. Even though each coin states its .900 silver content very conspicuously, no one was willing to take that as fact. Instead, each time the coins changed hands, an assayer would determine the silver content and then stamp his approval DIRECTLY INTO THE COIN. The more a coin was traded, the more marks it would accumulate. As you can see, this coin has been around!

These marks are called “chop marks” in the lingo of coin collectors. Because each assayer used a unique mark, it is possible to trace the locations a Trade Dollar visited. If anyone knows a good resource for decoding chop marks, I would love to see it! There is some controversy in the collecting community about chop marks. Most 3rd party grading services do not consider chop marks when grading, since they are part of the history of the coin. Some collectors are like me, and like the character and interest chop marks add. Others regard them as “damage” and avoid them whenever possible. Only you can decide who is right…

The trade dollar itself was only produced for 11 years, from 1873 to 1883, as it turned out to be rather unpopular with foreign countries. It was only 90% silver, but circulating next to it was the Spanish Milled Dollar, which I believe had a higher silver content. Many Spanish Milled Dollars also have chop marks. This coin is also not terribly popular with modern collectors, perhaps due to most of them not knowing it exists. You can get one at a pretty low price compared to less rare but more sought after coins.

So there you have it, a short lived experiment in foreign trade currency from the tail end of the 1800′s! Look forward to the next post for a coin with a defunct denomination.

Produced in 1982, it features George riding a horse on the front, and what I assume is his house on the back. According to our firends at Falmouth Stamp and Coin, this is the first commemorative half dollar produced since 1954, and the first 90% silver coin in the US since 1964. When I bought it I assumed it was clad (10% silver) but inspecting the edge reveals it is silver all the way though.

The reason the US mint stopped making commemoratives for so long is a little complicated. Basically, the whole commemorative program was beginning to lose credibility because they would make a coin for almost anything. The sale of these coins would typically support the pet projects of their promoters. One example of this phenomenon is a commemorative featuring Phineas Taylor Barnum, the owner of the Barnum and Bailey circus. Eventually congress passed a law prohibiting the issue of any further commemoratves, but appearently they changed their mind again in 1982.

Which is really actually pretty great, since this is a cool coin. This one cost only about $7, which is approximately the value of the silver if you melted it!

In the next post, look forward to hearing about the US’s most unusual silver dollar!

In 1943, the US Government started making pennies out of steel. But why? Well, the country was in the middle of WWII and there was a concern there would be a copper shortage. Brass shell casings for the soldiers’ bullets use a lot of copper. So the natural decision was to use a different metal for the most common of US coins. The following year, the shortage was over, and pennies switched back to copper (well bronze actually).

So that explains the steel part, but what about the “Ghost 4″ ? If you look at the pictures, you can see that the 4 in 1943 is almost completely missing. There is only a shadow of a 4 there. This defect is introduced by an error in the minting process, when grease gets into the die for the coin. The grease fills in numbers, letters, or even whole words! Whatever is filled in shows up weaker or almost missing on the coin. In this case, that was the 4 in 1943. So one faulty die stamped out coin after coin with missing or weak 4′s.

Out of a bank bag of 2500 steel pennies, I found about 15 good examples of a ghost 4 penny. I also found a few examples that have a ghost “S” as well for the mintmark.

So that about wraps up the first post for the blog, please let me know if you have any more info or picutres about these historical and wonderful coins.