50 Fun Facts About Coins

Which scientist spent 30 years at England's Royal Mint, sending coin counterfeiters to the gallows?

Isaac Newton took the post of Warden in 1696 and treated it as detective work, building the case that hanged the serial counterfeiter William Chaloner.

Which metal makes up 75% of the US five-cent coin, even though the coin is named after another?

Copper outweighs nickel three to one in the coin, a recipe unchanged since 1866 apart from World War II issues that swapped the nickel for silver and manganese.

Which Oregon city was named by a coin toss, with Boston as the losing choice?

Portland won because Francis Pettygrove of Portland, Maine, took two of three tosses against Asa Lovejoy of Boston; the 1835 cent they flipped is kept on display in a museum.

Coins tossed over the shoulder into which Roman landmark are collected and given to charity?

Trevi Fountain coins are swept up and donated to the Catholic charity Caritas, and legend says a coin tossed with the right hand over the left shoulder guarantees a return to Rome.

Which president became the first on a circulating US coin in 1909, a century after his birth?

Abraham Lincoln broke a taboo, since presidential portraits had been shunned as too monarchical, and the designer's initials caused such a fuss that they were removed within days.

The words money and mint both descend from Moneta, a title of which Roman goddess?

Juno had a temple on the Capitoline Hill, and Rome struck its coins in or beside it, so her title Moneta came to mean the mint and then the money it made.

Which cartoon tycoon prizes his Number One Dime, the first coin he ever earned, above his fortune?

Scrooge McDuck earned it at ten in Glasgow, cleaning a ditch-digger's filthy boots, only to find he had been paid with an American coin that was useless in Scotland.

What did the earliest known coin-operated machine, described by Hero of Alexandria, dispense?

Holy water flowed while the coin's weight tipped a lever inside; when the coin slid off, a counterweight shut the valve, a trick vending machines reused about 1,800 years later.

Which reformer was the first real woman on a circulating US coin, a dollar mistaken for a quarter?

Susan B. Anthony replaced a planned figure of Liberty in 1979, but the coin was so close to the quarter in size and metal that critics nicknamed it the Carter quarter.

Which zinc-coated metal replaced bronze in US cents for 1943 only, freeing supplies for ammunition?

Steel cents rusted and confused vending machines, so 1944 cents were made from salvaged shell casings; a 1943 cent struck by mistake on a leftover bronze blank later sold for $1.7 million.

Which president was honored on the US dime from 1946 for helping found the March of Dimes?

Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945 and the coin came out on what would have been his 64th birthday; rumor claimed the designer's initials, JS, were a tribute to Joseph Stalin.

Which presidential home has appeared on the back of most US nickels struck since 1938?

Monticello arrived in 1938 after Felix Schlag won a $1,000 open contest, only to be ordered to submit an entirely new reverse before the coin could go into production.

Which state, the first to ratify the Constitution, opened the 50 State Quarters series?

Delaware led because the quarters appeared in the order the states ratified the Constitution or joined the Union, a ten-year rollout that about half of all Americans collected.

Which crop frames the words ONE CENT on the back of US pennies struck from 1909 to 1958?

Wheat ears, two of them, gave the pennies their collector nickname and lasted until 1959, when a memorial building took their place for the 150th anniversary of a president's birth.

Which zoo animal did sculptor James Earle Fraser name as his model for the 1913 US five-cent coin?

A bison called Black Diamond was the model, Fraser said, and a stubborn one that kept facing him head-on; the animal was sold for slaughter in 1915, two years into the coin's run.

Which Native American woman appears carrying her infant son on the golden dollar issued in 2000?

Sacagawea, the Shoshone guide of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, left no known portrait, so sculptor Glenna Goodacre asked a young Native American woman, Randy'L He-dow Teton, to model for the coin.

Which poet, shown before a bird in flight, became the first Black woman on a US quarter?

Maya Angelou opened the American Women Quarters series in 2022; the bird behind her is a purple martin, native to Arkansas, where she grew up, and a nod to her best-known memoir.

Which figure replaced the eagle on Bicentennial US quarters, the winner of a national contest?

A colonial drummer by Jack Ahr, who said his son had posed for it, was picked from 884 entries; every Bicentennial quarter carries the double date 1776–1976, so none is dated 1975.

Which city, then the national capital, became home to the first United States Mint in 1792?

Philadelphia got the Mint because the government sat there, and its first director was a scientist, the astronomer David Rittenhouse, who bought the building lots himself that July.

Which Latin motto on US coins served as the unofficial national motto until 1956?

E pluribus unum, meaning out of many, one, has thirteen letters to match the original colonies, and it reached coins in 1786 on New Jersey's state cents, six years before a national mint existed.

Which animal appears on the Canadian two-dollar coin, the bimetallic piece nicknamed the toonie?

Polar bear art by Brent Townsend has backed the coin since 1996; an Inuit member of Parliament proposed calling it the Nanuq, but the rhyme with loonie won out.

Which musical instrument, a national emblem since the Middle Ages, appears on every Irish euro coin?

Harp designs on every Irish coin copy the medieval Brian Boru harp kept at Trinity College Dublin, the same emblem that appears on the seals of the president and the government.

Which Leonardo da Vinci work is on Italy's one-euro coin, the only design not put to a public vote?

Vitruvian Man was picked personally by economy minister Carlo Azeglio Ciampi before any vote was held; Italians then chose the other seven designs by phoning in during a television broadcast.

Which animal has backed the Australian 20-cent coin since decimal currency arrived in 1966?

Platypus artist Stuart Devlin was a goldsmith who won a 1964 competition to design Australia's first decimal coins, and he went on to design coins for 36 nations.

Which nation's five-unit coin is offered at shrines because its name echoes a word for connection?

Japan's five-yen coin is called go en, a homophone of a respectful word for a bond, so worshippers toss it into shrine offering boxes hoping to tie themselves to the deity.

What shape is the central hole of a traditional Chinese cash coin, used to string coins together?

Square holes inside round rims are commonly linked to the old Chinese picture of a round heaven over a flat, four-cornered earth, and a full string nominally held 1,000 coins.

Which British gold coin came to be worth 21 shillings, a shilling more than a pound?

Guinea coins were named for the Guinea region of West Africa, which supplied much of their gold, and the price outlived them: racehorse auctions kept bidding in guineas, the extra shilling being the auctioneer's commission.

Which shield-carrying female figure from Roman coins was revived on English money under Charles II?

Britannia swapped her Roman spear for a trident in 1797 to mark the Royal Navy's victories, and she gained a helmet in 1825.

Which foreign silver coin stayed legal tender in the United States until the Coinage Act of 1857?

Spanish dollar coins, the pieces of eight of pirate lore, were worth eight reales, and each real was known as a bit, which is how a US quarter came to be called two bits.

Foil-wrapped chocolate coins called gelt are handed to children during which Jewish festival?

Hanukkah gelt began as real money given to children, and the chocolate version arrived only in the twentieth century, when American candy makers wrapped it in gold foil.

Which pursuit, nicknamed the Hobby of Kings, is the study and collecting of coins and medals?

Numismatics took its royal nickname from early devotees, and the poet Petrarch, pestered by vine diggers selling Roman coins they had dug up, is credited as its first Renaissance collector.

What do collectors call the heads side of a coin, the face that usually carries the main portrait?

Obverse sides are called heads because they so often show a ruler's head, a custom Western monarchies inherited from Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors.

Which Roman broke with a custom of gods and ancestors to become the first living person on Rome's coins?

Julius Caesar's portrait reached the coins in early 44 BC, and a later issue added his new title, dictator for life, weeks before his assassination on the Ides of March.

Which 1970s TV police drama built an episode around a real 1913 Liberty Head nickel worth $100,000?

Hawaii Five-O featured the coin in 1973, a year after it became the first coin to sell for $100,000; only five exist, and historians suspect a Mint employee struck them on the sly.

Where in Nevada did a US Mint operate from 1870 to 1893, coining silver from the Comstock Lode?

Carson City stamped a CC mint mark on everything it struck, gold included, and the old mint building later became the Nevada State Museum.

Which Lydian king, a byword for vast wealth, is credited with issuing the first true gold coins?

Croesus replaced the unpredictable gold-silver mix of earlier Lydian coins with separate gold and silver ones stamped with a lion and a bull, and his name became a synonym for a rich man.

Which Roman coin is the source of the word dinero and of the d once used for British pence?

Denarius coins were Rome's everyday silver from about 211 BC into the third century AD, and the name also survives in the dinar used by several nations.

In which state did a couple walking their dog in 2013 find the Saddle Ridge Hoard of gold coins?

California soil gave up eight buried cans holding 1,427 coins with a face value of $27,980, later valued at $10 million, and the finders have no idea who hid them.

Which law, named after a Tudor financier, says bad money drives good money out of circulation?

Gresham's law emptied American pockets of silver in the 1960s: once new coins held less of the metal, people hoarded the old ones and spent the debased ones.

Which sculptor designed the $20 gold double eagle of 1907 but died before the coin was released?

Augustus Saint-Gaudens modeled the design in such high relief that it proved too hard to strike, so after his death the Mint flattened it until one blow of the press was enough.

Which natural gold-silver alloy, once called white gold, was used for the earliest known coins?

Electrum varied so much in its gold content that no two early coins were worth quite the same, a flaw that pushed later rulers toward coins of separate pure metals.

What do mints call the round metal disc, ready for striking, that a press turns into a coin?

Planchet discs were heated before striking in ancient mints, because the dies of the day were too soft to survive pounding cold metal for long.

Which king, deposed in 1952, bought a 1933 Double Eagle and won a US export license for the coin?

Farouk of Egypt got the license by mistake, days before the Mint realized its 1933 gold coins had been stolen; he owned more than 8,500 coins by the time he lost his throne.

The king of which land received an 1804 US dollar, a diplomatic gift struck 30 years after its date?

Siam got a cased set of coins from envoy Edmund Roberts; no dollar had been struck with the 1804 date, so the Mint made some for such gifts, and the Sultan of Muscat received another.

What was the face value of the Civil War-era US coin that first carried the motto In God We Trust?

Two cents was the denomination, first issued in 1864 while wartime hoarding kept small change scarce; the coin was abolished only nine years later.

Which New York goldsmith made the 1787 doubloon central to Raymond Chandler's The High Window?

Ephraim Brasher punched his EB hallmark into each coin, a mark trusted enough that he stamped it on other people's coins too, and one doubloon fetched $9.36 million in 2021.

Before Denver, the D mint mark on US gold coins stood for which Georgia gold-rush town?

Dahlonega struck nothing but gold, from 1838 to 1861, sparing Georgia miners a long journey north to have their finds assayed and coined.

What is the term for a government's profit when a coin's face value exceeds the cost of making it?

Seigniorage comes from the Old French for a lord's right to mint money, and it once meant the fee a ruler took from anyone who brought metal to be coined.

Which British king defied the custom of alternating coin portraits, insisting on his left profile?

Edward VIII wanted the parting in his hair to show, but he abdicated before the coins could circulate, and the handful of test pieces that were struck are all very rare.

The word dollar comes from which silver coin, named for the Bohemian valley where it was minted?

Thaler is short for Joachimsthaler, a coin from the silver-mining valley of Joachimsthal, and English bent the Low German form daler into dollar by about 1600.