Coins Daily

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.