byGosh.com: St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, May 1878

St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, May 1878

Where Money Is Made

by M.W.

"Ho!" I hear some New York boys say; "no need to tell us that. Everybody knows that New York is the place to make money. Look at the men in Wall street."

Indeed! And what will you say if I tell you that there is not a dollar of money made in New York; nor in Chicago, neither; though I know my young friends who live there are eager to speak up and claim the honor. There are but three cities in all the Union where money is actually made; that is, where metals are coined. The principal mint of the United States is in Philadelphia. Here are made all the copper and nickel coins—one, two and five cent pieces—and a large part of the gold and silver coins used in the country. There are also branch mints at San Francisco and Carson City. And at these places gold and silver coins of every value are coined in great quantities.

Those of you who have been in Philadelphia will remember, on the north side of Chestnut street, near Broad, a Grecian building of white marble, somewhat gray from age, with a tall chimney rising from the center, and the United States flag flying from the roof. This is the mint. Let us climb the long flight of steps and enter the building. On the door is a placard: "Visitors admitted from 9 to 12." The door opens into a circular entrance hall, with seats around the wall. In a moment a polite usher, who has grown gray in the service of the institution, comes to show us all that visitors are allowed to see. He leads us through a hall into an open court-yard in the middle of the building. On the left is the weighing-room; and if you owned a gold mine, like the boy I read of in a late number of ST. NICHOLAS, it is to this room you would bring your gold to be weighed, so that you might know how much money the mint must pay you for it. All the gold and silver received in the mint is weighed in this room. Sometimes the gold is brought in the form of fine dust; sometimes in the shape of grains from the size of a pin's head to that of a pea; sometimes in plates and bars, and sometimes it is old jewelry and table service. Visitors are not allowed to enter the weighing-room; but, by looking through the window you can see the scales, large and small, which are balanced with wonderful delicacy, and the vault on the other side, where the treasure is kept.

The Mint at Philidelphia

"When the gold has been weighed," says our guide, "it is locked up in iron boxes, and carried to the melting-room, where it is melted and poured into molds."A small piece is then cut off, and its fineness ascertained by a long and delicate process called assaying. This decides the value of the lot. The depositor is then paid, and the metal is handed over to the melter and refiner, to be entirely freed from its impurities and made fit for coinage.
And a hard time it has of it, to be sure. Nothing but pure gold and silver could ever stand such treatment. It is melted again, dissolved in nitric acid, squeezed under immense pressure, baked in a hot cellar, and finally carried to this dingy-looking room, at the left of the court-yard, where we have stood all this time. The metal is perfectly pure now, but before the final melting one-tenth of its weight in copper is added to it, to make it hard enough to bear the rough usage which it will meet with in traveling about the world.

Pouring the Melted Gold into the Molds

The room would be dark but for the fiery glow of the furnaces which line one end of the place. On these are a number of small pots, filled with red-hot liquid metal; and while we look, a workman lifts one after another, with a pair of long tongs, and pours the glowing gold in streams into narrow iron molds.
"This piece of gold," says the usher, taking up one of the yellow bars from a cold mold, "is called an ingot, and is worth about 1,200 dollars."

"This piece of gold," says the usher, taking up one of the yellow bars from a cold mold, "is called an ingot, and is worth about 1,200 dollars."

One of the party asks why one end of the ingot is shaped like a wedge.

"That it may enter easily between the rollers," is the reply. "You will see the rollers when we go upstairs."

This takes place in the rolling-room, where the short, thick ingots are pressed between two steel rollers, again and again, till they are rolled down into long thin ribbons of metal about the thickness of a coin.

The next step in the work is to draw the metal ribbons through a "draw-plate," to bring them down to an exactly uniform thickness. This pulling through a narrow slit in a steel plate hardens the metal, and again and again it has to be put in the fire and brought to a light red to make it soft and pliable. This drawing and annealing brings each band of metal to just the right thickness and condition, and we may go on and see the cutting-presses that stamp out the round pieces of metal called "planchets." A workman takes a ribbon of gold and inserts the end in the immense jaws of the press, and they bite, bite and bite, and the round bits of gold drop in a shower into a box below.

The Rollers

"The planchets," says the guide, "after being annealed in those furnaces which you see at the rear of the room, are taken upstairs and most carefully weighed."

None but women are employed in the weighing-room, and so delicate are the scales that they will move with the weight of a hair. If a planchet is found too light, it is thrown aside to be remelted; if only slightly over the proper weight, a tiny particle is filed off from the edge; but if the weight is much in excess, it is to go back to the furnace. Nothing but perfection passes here, you see.

Now, one final washing in acid, then in water, and these much-enduring bits of metal are admitted to the coining-room, there to receive the stamp which testifies to their worth.

In the coining-room the planchets are first given to the milling-machine. They are laid down flat between two steel rings, and as the rings move one draws nearer to the other, and the planchets are squeezed and crowded on every side, and finding no escape they turn up about the edges and come out at the end of the sorry little journey with a rim raised around the edges. Beyond the milling-machines stand the ten coining-presses. These presses are attended by women. Watch this one near us. At her right hand is a box containing silver planchets, which are to be coined into fifty-cent pieces. On that round "die," which you see in the center of the machine, are engraved the letters and figures which are to appear on the back of the half-dollar. Directly above the die, on the end of a rod, which works up and down with the most exquisite accuracy, is the sunken impression of the face.

The woman gathers up a handful of the planchets and drops them one at a time into a brass tube, which they just fit. They slip down in the tube, and as the lowest planchet slides from under the tube, two small steel arms spring out and grasp it and lay it on the die. At the same instant, the upper die descends with a quick thump, and the silver counter, stamped in a twinkling on both sides, falls into a box below. In an instant, another takes its place, and thus they go on dropping under the swiftly moving rod, and turning into coins in a flash.

The Coining-Press

Take up one of the coins and study it carefully. Every mark, letter, number and bit of decoration is deeply cut in the metal. Even the "reeding," or roughened edge, is stamped sharply, and we can tell just what the coin is by feeling of it with the finger, even in the dark. This last step finishes the work. The money is made, coined and ready for exchange in the shop and market. Sometimes you may have noticed that coins, like the nickel five-cent and the silver twenty-cent piece, have smooth edges. In these coins the reeding is omitted. The dies in the presses have only the letters and figures of the face and back of the coin, and when the planchet is caught between them the metal is squeezed up against the smooth sides of the die, and none of the little reeding marks on the edge are formed.

"And now," says our kind conductor, "you have seen all the process of making money. This next room is the cabinet, and here you can remain as long as you please."

But I have not time to tell you half the curious and instructive things you may see in this apartment. There are coins of all nations and ages. Egyptian, Greek, and Roman, bearing effigies of forgotten kings and emperors; curious oblong coins, of very fine workmanship, from China and Japan, and others of a square shape with a hole in the middle, that they may be strung on a string, instead of putting them into a purse. Smallest of all, so small that you might overlook it, if your attention was not especially drawn to it, is the "widow's mite." Perhaps——who knows?—this may be the very coin which, dropped into the trumpet-shaped mouth of the treasury, called forth the commendation of the Savior upon the poor giver.

In other cases are the coins of England, France, Germany and other modern nations; some more beautiful than our own, others far inferior to them in design and workmanship. The cases around the wall are filled with beautiful minerals, and, in particular, many fine specimens of gold in its native state.

For so long a time have we been using paper money in this country that it seemed almost useless to have mints to make coins, when ordinary people never saw any of them, excepting those made of copper or nickel.

But our merchants, and others dealing with foreign countries, needed gold, for our paper money could not be sent to Europe, or anywhere out of the United States, to pay for goods; and so gold eagles and double-eagles and half-eagles and quarter-eagles and gold dollars were coined to be sent away, or to be used here to pay duties on imports. Silver coins also were made, to be used in foreign countries, and among these was the trade-dollar, which many of you may have seen.

When silver small-change lately came into use again, there were many boys and girls who had never seen a quarter or a half dollar. When they spoke of fifty or twenty-five cents, they meant a piece of paper currency, printed like a bank-note, of no value in itself, but only a promise to pay.

But, since Congress has decided that we are to have not only silver small-change, but also silver dollars, and now that these have became again a part of the legal currency of the country; all three of our mints have gone to work and are coining dollars as fast as they can, for millions of them will be required, if we are all to use them.

I hope that you and I, dear reader, may be able to get as many of these new dollars as we actually shall need, though perhaps none of us may ever have as many of them, or of any other kind of money, as we think we should like to have.