Techniques of production

The increase of mining activity in central Europe during the 15th century gave a great impetus to the development of modern minting processes. The dies themselves were still made by punches, but these, in turn, had become much more sophisticated, often embodying a complete portrait of the monarch. Their general shape depended on the striking process employed, but the material used was a steel that could be hardened by carburizing (putting iron in a bed of carbon in a sealed air-tight box, and thence into a furnace, where the carbon diffused into the outer layers) after the designs had been punched in, or sunk.

The metal for the coins was cast as ingots, a typical size being 1 2 × 1 × 20 inches. These were then passed between steel rollers, powered by a water mill or horse gin (a mechanism that translated horsepower into rotational energy), to reduce the thickness. Several passes and annealings were necessary to obtain the correct thickness. The blanks, particularly for the larger crown-sized coins being introduced, continued to be roughly cut with shears from the rolled fillet (metal strip), so that, as previously, they could easily be adjusted for weight before being rounded in rouleaux. In some cases, however, they were punched by a machine from the fillet to a fixed diameter, so that the thickness was critical for controlling weight. To protect against clipping, during the next century a security edge was sometimes rolled onto the blank; this might consist of an inscription or a serrated or milled edge.

Hand-operated screw presses were developed for stamping the designs on the blanks; although the blanks originally were centred on the lower die by eye, it soon became clear that a locating collar would prevent off-centre striking. Such a method was used by Benvenuto Cellini, who struck coins for Italian princes in the first half of the 16th century, and it was then introduced first to Paris and then to London in the 1550s.

At the same time the roller press was under development in Germany. Initially, the die designs were engraved or punched into the curved surfaces of two rollers that were geared together so that the whole fillet (rather than single blanks) could be fed between them and emerge impressed. This method was advantageous in requiring less power: only part of the blank was being deformed at any one time, and so, as compared with the screw press, the stresses on the machine were reduced. Because of imperfections, the fillet and the finished coins as punched out were markedly curved, and the coins required flattening (planishing) by light tapping with a smooth-faced hammer.

The difficulty of taking out the complete rollers from such a press led to an ingenious variation—the Taschenwerke. In this machine the rollers were replaced by rectangular shafts pierced in the middle to take a pair of dies with tapered extensions (tangs). The axis of the upper shaft could be raised or lowered a short distance to accommodate variations in the dies or differing coin thicknesses. Such machines continued to be used in Germany into the 18th century.

The rocker press represents another variation. The bottom roller (actually a quadrant insert, as in the Taschenwerke) remained stationary; the axis of the upper roller rotated about this lower axis as a small circle around a larger, so that the upper die face rolled over a stationary fillet that had been positioned over the lower die. One such mechanism, now in the British Museum, produced minor copper coins in Spain soon after 1600.

The prolific Jean Warin, one of the great engravers, finally established the use of the fly press, a variation on the screw press in which the helix angle of the screw was much increased. The rotational arms ended in heavy weights that were swung with great velocity by two operators (working for only 20 minutes in each hour), and the elasticity of the system caused a rebound of the arm to its original position after the coin had been struck. Again, with a team of moneyers, a rate of production of a coin every second or so could be achieved. In some Russian mints of about 1800 a guided dropping weight functioned in much the same way, regaining its original position partly by rebounding and partly by operators pulling on return ropes running over pulleys.

In the 1770s the steam engines of Matthew Boulton and the Scottish inventor James Watt made available new sources of power that were soon adapted to the coining process. Initially used to strike commercial tokens, these methods were eventually taken up by the Royal Mint in London. Experiments produced new steels that could cope with the much higher stresses involved, while a French invention, the pantograph, or reducing machine, permitted the manufacture of a standardized design for every denomination, all being reproduced identically but to differing scales.

In modern minting, the sequence of die manufacture is as follows. A plaster model of the proposed design, about one foot (0.3 metre) in diameter, is received from the artist and a mold is made; from this is obtained an electrotype copy in nickel and copper. Mounted in the reducing machine, the copy permits the cutting of the design to the appropriate coin size in a block of steel, the master punch, which has features in relief, as on the eventual coin. The master is then used to punch-in, or sink, a matrix; this raises a working punch, which is used to sink a working die. Imperfections at any stage are removed by hand tooling and, for best results, the surface of the working die is highly polished before it is sunk.

The production of blanks (called planchets in the United States) is highly automated. At the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, for example, the incoming metal is assayed to ensure that it is of the correct specification. After being sheared into small pieces, the metal, together with the waste clippings (scissel) from previous blanking operations, is conveyed to a computer-controlled weighing section, where a charging bucket is filled with the correct proportions of each constituent of the required alloy; the metal then goes into a 15,000-pound-capacity electric induction melting furnace. During the melting, deoxidation additives are introduced, and the furnace is then tilted to pour the metal into a water-cooled, semicontinuous casting machine mold with a movable bottom. The resulting vertical ingot, with dimensions of 16 inches by 6 inches by 18 feet and a weight of 6,600 pounds, is set on a roller conveyer in a horizontal position preparatory to being cut by a rotary saw into two equal lengths. The bars are next raised in temperature in a high-frequency induction coil so that they can be hot-rolled. After nine passes the thickness of the bars is reduced to less than one-half inch, and the length is extended to approximately 115 feet. Quenching with water is followed by skim milling in order to remove the oxide layer on the top and the bottom surfaces. The coils of strip metal are next cold-rolled, reducing the thickness to about one-tenth of an inch. The ends of the individual coils are then trimmed and welded together, giving a large coil weighing some 4 1 2 tons. Finally, the coil is rolled under tension in a finishing mill, where the thickness is controlled by sensors.

The blanking presses are typically high speed, punching out from the coils as many as 21 planchets per stroke at 100 or more strokes per minute, the scissel being returned to the melting pot. For coins of small denomination the planchets are then fed into an annealing furnace, quenched with water, cleaned with acid, washed, and dried. The subsequent operation is edge-up setting, the partial formation of a protective rim by forcing the blank into too small a hole. The planchets then proceed to the coining presses, many of which are adapted to cope with four coins at one blow. The spread of the metal under the force of the die is confined by a collar, and the radial recovery of the metal as the load is removed prevents its adherence to the collar, as the latter is retracted below die level. The struck coins are taken to a checking point, after which they are counted and bagged, ready for distribution. Die life is upwards of 200,000 coins.

The procedures at the United Kingdom’s Royal Mint, at Llantrisant, Wales, are analogous. There, however, the ingots are cast continuously, not in discrete lengths, and they are subsequently sawed for the rolling operations. The edge-up setting is sometimes combined with the impression of a channeled security edge of the type found on Indian issues. To assist metal flow during striking, the washing and lubricating of the blanks are combined. The production of seven-sided coins (20- and 50-pence denominations) from circular blanks indicates the extent of the flow of the blank metal within the collar; the striking presses are capable of 600 strokes per minute. The counting and bagging operation is performed by robots. An experiment in obtaining the correct weight of gold issues, where the “remedy,” or tolerance (permitted range of variation in the standard), is very limited, showed that when the blanks were punched from fillets that were one-third inch thick and then pressed out to the normal thickness of one-tenth of an inch, the same error in initial thickness had less eventual effect on the weight of a one-third-inch blank than on a one-tenth-inch blank. In this experiment the same solution to obtaining correct weight was applied as in the medieval period, when the use of easily measurable lengths of thin silver rods gave the correct weight per penny.

Percy Gardner, A History of Ancient Coinage, 700–300 bc (1919, reprinted 1974), is an exhaustive study of the development of early measures of value, the origin of coin standards, and the mutual relationship of precious metals. The general history of coins and coinage is given in George Macdonald, The Evolution of Coinage (1916, reprinted 1980); Thomas W. Becker, The Coin Makers, rev. ed. (1970); Lionel Casson and Martin Price (eds.), Coins, Culture, and History in the Ancient World (1981); Sir John Craig, The Mint: A History of the London Mint from ad 287 to 1948 (1953); R.A.G. Carson, Coins Ancient, Mediaeval & Modern, 2nd ed. (1970; U.S. title, Coins of the World); Martin Price and Bluma L. Trell, Coins and Their Cities: Architecture on the Ancient Coins of Greece, Rome, and Palestine (1977); Martin Price (general ed.), Coins: An Illustrated Survey, 650 bc to the Present Day (1980); and Gerald Hoberman, The Art of Coins and Their Photography (1982).

Topical treatments can be found in J.G. Milne, Greek Coinage (1931); Colin M. Kraay, Archaic and Classical Greek Coins (1976); Barclay V. Head, Historia Numorum: A Manual of Greek Numismatics, new ed. (1911, reprinted 1983); P.D. Whitting, Byzantine Coins (1973); Philip Grierson, Byzantine Coins (1982); C.H.V. Sutherland, Roman Coins (1974); Harold Mattingly, Roman Coins from the Earliest Times to the Fall of the Western Empire, 2nd ed. (1960, reprinted 1977); Arthur Engel and Raymond Serrure, Traité de numismatique du moyen âge, 3 vol. (1891–1905, reprinted 1977); and George C. Brooke, English Coins from the Seventh Century to the Present Day, 3rd rev. ed. (1950, reprinted 1976).

Most of the above-mentioned works include bibliographies. For a separate bibliographic treatment, see Philip Grierson, Coins and Medals: A Select Bibliography (1954). Technology of minting is explored in George F. Hill, Ancient Methods of Coining (1977), a work that was originally a pioneering article in a 1924 issue of the Numismatic Chronicle of the Royal Numismatic Society; Cornelius C. Vermeule, Some Notes on Ancient Dies and Coining Methods (1954), a description of surviving ancient dies and other evidence relating to minting; and D. Sellwood, “Minting,” in Roman Crafts, ed. by Donald Strong and David Brown (1976).

Illustrations of copies of early machinery can be found in Ludwig Veit, Das Liebe Geld: Zwei Jahrtausende Geld- und Münzgeschichte (1969). F. Mazerolle, Les Medailleurs Français du XV ^e siècle au milieu du XVII ^e , 3 vol. (1902–04), discusses documents relating to the introduction of machinery to French mints. A general overview of minting with emphasis on modern technology is presented in Denis R. Cooper, Coins and Minting (1983).