Mint

a place where precious metal is made into coin by public authority. In all civilized countries coining is done by the government in order to protect the people from false material and light weight. When gold and silver were first used for money the pieces were of no particular shape or size. They were taken by weight. About 700 B. C. the Lydians of Asia Minor, who found considerable gold in the sands of their rivers, adopted the plan of stamping pieces with their value to save weighing. So far as known this was the beginning of coinage.

A great many coins of the ancients have been found in ruins and are now preserved in museums. They were evidently made by hand and are very rude affairs. A medieval cut represents four moneymakers at work. The first is melting the precious metal and casting it into ingots. The second is hammering an ingot into a thin sheet. A third, armed with a pair of powerful metal shears, is cutting out round disks, or blanks. A fourth lays the blank on a figured anvil, holds a die on top of it, as one would hold a cold chisel, and hammers away with might and main to impress figures on the two faces.

The United Kingdom has six mints. That at London supplies the home demand and Canada. Branch mints are maintained at Sydney, Melbourne, Calcutta, and Bombay for the convenience of Australia and the East Indies. France has mints at Paris and Bordeaux. The chief mint of the United States, that at Philadelphia, was established in 1792. Others have been established at New Orleans, 1835, San Francisco, 1853, and Denver, 1862.

A modern mint is an extensive establishment requiring the service of expert employes, a large amount of intricate machinery, and delicate apparatus for weighing, but the principal steps in coinage are not difficult to understand.

Gold and silver are purchased in ingots, just as one would buy lead or pig iron. They are taken in over the counter, weighed and receipted for. The ingots are then sent to a testing room to determine their fineness. The seller calls a few days later and receives an order on the public treasury for the value of his ingots. The next step is to rid the ingots of all possible impurities, and to mix them with the right proportion of baser metal, in order to secure the right degree of hardness. Pure gold or pure silver is too soft and wears away too fast for use as money.

Coining, whether of gold or silver, is essentially the same process. The silver bars, for instance, are melted and run into ingots of uniform size. These ingots are run through heavy rollers ten times until reduced to long strips the width and thickness of the coin desired. The strips are then passed through a heavy punching machine that cuts out circular blanks. These blanks are run through a self-acting weighing machine that sorts them into three piles, those that are too light, those that are too heavy, and those that are just right. The light blanks are returned with the perforated strips to the melting room to be made into ingots anew. The heavy blanks are filed slightly on the edge to reduce them to the proper weight. The true blanks are now fed through a tube into a milling machine that presses up the edge of the coin so that it is a little thicker than the center. This is done in order to protect the figures on the coin from wear and also to prevent their sliding off inconveniently when piled up in stacks or rolls on the banker's counter. The blanks with thickened edges are then fed through a heavy stamping machine or press that forces the metal into a round die, which prints the figures on both sides of the coin, as well as flutes the edge, at the rate of eighty silver dollars or 120 silver dimes per minute. Imperfect coins are rejected by a second weighing machine. The perfect coins are counted by being shaken over a frame or tray in which grooves are arranged to catch the coins. When a tray is full, its contents are dumped through a hopper into a canvas bag and sent away for storage. In the case of the more valuable gold coins, the final tests of weight are made by hand, with delicate scales. All workmen who handle the metal wear leather aprons and leather gloves. When these are worn out, they are burned to recover the gold and silver that accumulates in them. Even the sweepings are passed through fire to recover the gold dust which escapes in the process of coining.

Dies for all the mints are made in the head office at Philadelphia. As our mints are not kept busy at all times they are permitted to coin money for other governments. Money has been coined for the governments of South and of Central America.

The monthly statement of the coinage executed at the mints of the United States during August, 1906, showed a total of 13,820,000 pieces, with a value of $9,369,100. Of this 632,000 pieces were eagles double eagles, value $8,380,000; and 5,178,000 pieces of silver, amounting to $909,000. In addition 8,010,000 one-cent pieces were struck off, besides 200,000 five-peso gold pieces for Mexico and 30,000 silver pesos for the Philippine Islands, for which work no charge except the cost of labor is made.

See Coin; Gold; Silver; Nickel; Dollar; Greenback; Legal Tender; Counterfeit