• The Coinage Act of 1792 created the U.S. Mint. At the time, some coins were made out of gold or silver, while other coins were not made of precious metals. People kept shaving the edges of the gold and silver coins, so they could still spend the coins while keeping some of the gold and silver. As a result, ridges were added to the edges of the precious metal coins so that shaving would be obvious and the coins could no longer be spent. The U.S. Mint stopped making gold coins during the Great Depression, and the Coinage Act of 1965 removed all silver from coins due to the silver shortage. It’s expensive to make new equipment to stamp out new coin designs, so the ridges stayed in place even though there is no longer any precious metal in coins. Ridges also help the blind identify coins, particularly in being able to tell the difference between pennies and dimes.
• Dimes have 118 ridges; quarters have 119.
• President Lincoln appeared on a one-cent coin and became the first real person, as well as the first American president, to have his face appear on an American coin. Lincoln’s face replaced the Indian head penny in 1909 in order to celebrate his 100th birthday. The Lincoln Memorial on the back was added for his 150th birthday in 1959.
• The Native American on the Indian Head and Buffalo nickels was actually a combined image created from three different people: a Cheyenne named Chief Two Moons, an Iroquois named Chief John Big Tree, and a Sioux named Chief Iron Tail.
• When the U.S. Mint began in the 1790s, one of the places it bought copper was from a firm owned by Paul Revere.
• Today the Mint produces an average of 14.7 million coins per day. How many paper bills does the U.S. Mint print every day? Not a single one. That’s the job of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
• The coin representing 1/100th of a U.S. dollar is called a cent, not a penny. The term penny came from European settlers, but it has never been an official term in the U.S.
• The word “cent” comes from the Latin “centum” meaning one hundred, the same root word that gives us century, and percent.
• The word penny comes from the Old English “penning,” which in turn is thought to derive from the German “pfennig.”
• The nickel’s name is unique because it’s the only U.S. coin that is called by its metal content, even though it’s only 25% nickel. The rest is copper. Five-cent coins minted from 1942-1945 don’t actually contain any nickel. Due to the shortage of nickel during World War II, they were made of an alloy of copper, silver and manganese.
• The word “nickel” dates back to the 1750s in Sweden and Germany. One meaning of the German word nickel is “rascal,” and “kupfernickel” meant “false copper.” Miners invented this name because nickel ore looks like copper, which is more valuable. Sometimes the miners thought they had found copper, but they were fooled by that rascally kupfernickel.
• The dime comes from the Latin “decimus,” meaning “one-tenth” as in decimal.
• “Coin” comes from the Latin “cuneus” meaning “corner.” The word first meant “wedge” but came to mean “a thing that is stamped” or “a piece of money” because dies for stamping metal were wedge-shaped.
