TRANSITIONAL LINCOLN CENTS In numismatics, Transitional refers to highly collectible coins struck when the U.S. Mint altered a coin’s metal composition or design. These errors occur when leftover planchets from an older year – or unintended die designs – are mistakenly fed into the coining press alongside new issue. In this article, we will be…
MINT ERRORS When we speak of mint errors, some people will think of doubled dies (DDO’s & DDR’s), re-punched mint marks (RPM’s), and over mint marks (OMM’s). Doubled Dies are errors related to die creation whereas RPM’s and OMM’s are human errors cause by the manual process adding a mint mark to an existing die. …
COINS of the CIVIL WAR Yet another one of the Allentown/Bethlehem Coin Club’s young numismatists expressed an interest in the coinage of the Civil War. So let’s start there: The American Civil War took place from April 12, 1861, to April 9, 1865. It began when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina,…
COIN SPECIFICATIONS One of our club’s young numismatists asked the following question: why are U.S. coins the sizes and weights they are? The answer is that the sizes and weights of U.S. coins weren’t chosen randomly. They come from a mix of history, practicality, metal values, and standardization. Here’s the breakdown: 1. Early Coinage &…
I was recently asked to review a couple hundred ‘error’ coins. Though many were marked as Double Die, not one coin was a true Doubled Die. These coins were all the result of strike doubling. Strike doubling is one of the many terms (a.k.a. shelf, shift, or machine doubling) used to describe a doubling effect…
The United States trade dollar was a dollar coin minted by the United States Mint to compete with other large silver trade coins that were already popular in East Asia. The idea first came about in the 1860s, when the price of silver began to decline due to increased mining efforts in the western United…
Key Dates Mintage Key Dates Mintage 1909 S VDB 484,000 1909 S 1,825,000 1914 D 1,193,000 1931 S 866,000 Semi-Key Dates Mintage 1910 S 6,045,000 1911 S 4,026,000 1912 S 4,431,000 1913 S 6,101,000 1914 S 4,137,000 1915 S 4,833,000 1922 D 7,160,000 1923 S 8,700,000 1924 D 2,520,000 1926 S 4,550,000 1931 S 4,480,000…
