A wonderful pastime: collecting coins
Have you ever wondered where that strange coin in your sock drawer is from or where it was made? I wondered that and I became a coin collector. I have old coins and relatively new coins. I have gold coins and I have silver coins. I have copper coins and I have bronze coins: I have weird coins and I have normal coins! The point is, you should start looking into coins because they might have some extreme value you might not know about. So start collecting coins today!
From a Liberty Walking to a Standing Eagle, from a Franklin half dollar to a Liberty Bell, from a Presidential Seal to an Eagle-in-Flight, the names of the coins themselves are fantastic.
Counting coins! Euros! This is a one-Euro coin. It is the currency of the European Union, and overtook many currencies, gradually but still not used by Switzerland, nor Denmark among others. It is heavy enough to count easily in one’s pocket by fingering it, but is altogether bland, and pretty forgettable. After all, it is used all over the European Union, so it doesn’t have much personality.
A long time ago when there was someone dumb enough to leave a penny printer on without watching it, a mistake occurred, one side of all the pennies were blank! And that’s why you make it through college kids!
Some of the most common coins in America are the penny, nickel, dime, and quarter. The penny is one of the only coins made in the U.S. that uses bronze instead of silver. The nickel is the only U.S. coin that is called by its metal content. The “dime” is based on the Latin word “decimus,” meaning “one tenth.”
I will break down for you these three excellent coins starting with the half dollar: 1988. The man on the coin is John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
The dollar coin features Sacajawea: this 2001 one dollar coin is worth $5.25 which is 5 1/4 times what it used to be.
Each coin starts as a blank. Blanks are punched out of 1,500 foot-long strips of metal by blank machines. The strips end up looking like a long flat strip of metal Swiss cheese. Sometimes some of these coins don’t get stamped on both sides making some of them have a blank side. This is really rare because the machine or some other technical difficulties would have to have happened making a blank side. Although it’s not that worthwhile looking for since it’s only 12 to 15 dollars and it’s still really rare, I would recommend looking for one. However, I haven’t even looked for one, and do not possess one.
My grandma is very special to me; something that was very special to her was her jar of coins. When she was little, she liked to go on walks and look for coins. Five years ago we found that jar and looked through them: one of them was a 23-karat gold coin! She let us keep the ancient jar of coins, but this jar was really dusty and hard to see through, so we put all the coins into a bag and that was the start of the bag. Then of course with the gold coin we found we had to look into it, and we found out a lot, one of those things being that the coin was worth a lot (16k).
There are lots of coins – which ones should I talk about? Maybe the Franklin half dollar, maybe the Peace dollar, maybe even the Mercury dime. Oh! I know, how about the buffalo nickel? The buffalo nickel has a buffalo as you may have guessed, on the back of the coin. The buffalo’s name is Black Diamond, and the strange thing is that he is a bison, not a buffalo. The coin is also named the Indian head coin because the front of the coin, drum roll please, has an Indian head on it (wow what a shocker)!
Oldest coins: In the above photo, you can see room for old coins (on the right part of the left page). These are, in descending order: First we have the penny. Now, if it were a normal penny then we wouldn’t be talking – first this penny is called the Indian head cent and it was made in 1899, it’s old and hard to see but it’s still here today; second we have a nickel – this nickel is no ordinary nickel though, this nickel is called a Liberty Head V nickel, it was made in 1899 and is worth $8.32 which makes it 166 times its original value.
Alas, the coins that you have read about have been read, the pictures have been looked at, and the cool tidbits are over. The final stretch is here… but I’ll throw you a bone or two… along with some cool facts.
The first coins at the U.S. mint in Philadelphia in 1792 may have been made from George Washington’s silverware. Because there were no gold mines nearby, the silver and gold was sourced from jewelers, private parties, and recycled foreign coins.
One of the first pennies minted as an experiment in the 1850s had a donut hole shape in the middle.
The 1943 zinc-coated steel Lincoln penny is the only U.S. coin that can be picked up with a magnet.
The Highly brothers of Connecticut made the first copper coins in America in the 1730s. When people questioned the value of the coins, John Highly issued new coins with these words stamped on them: VALUE ME AS YOU PLEASE.
In collecting coins, stories unfold at every turn. When we hold the coin to the light, when we scrutinize the marks of age, when we research a recent find, and when we know as much as possible about that coin, it seems as if we are scratching the surface. For instance, our final coin. Behold, a coin of the Pilgrims! Because the Pilgrims were a renegade group from Britain, they willingly withheld information about currency.
Nearly all the early “pine tree coins” made in Massachusetts bore the date 1652—-although they weren’t issued until 1687! The British did not want the colonists to make coins. So the early Americans tricked the British into thinking they stopped making coins in 1652!
