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Health Insurance How to get a free health insurance quote and enroll in an affordable plan by. Opinion Honor those who served, and remember why by. Practical considerations demanded a low value token coinage in order to make change. The first copper cents were as almost as large as current day half dollars. This was an attempt to make that coin intrinsic one cent worth of copper.
It eventually became impractical to use such a coin in everyday transactions and that coin was tokenized and reduced by to the size we see the cent today. Token coinage was not directly redeemable for precious metal coins and therefore not legal tender.
For example, a 19th century bank might refuse to change 25 one cent coins into a silver quarter. The copper-nickel 5 cent was introduced as a token coinage in as was made larger for practical reasons. Though tiny, silver half dimes continued to be produced until the larger copper-nickel coin was easier to handle and less likely to be lost. Note that only precious metal coins had reeded edges. Base metal coins had plain edges. Just after , the US was still nominally on a gold standard, but only to stabilize international exchange rates.
Gold coins did not circulate, and private ownership of gold had been banned during the Great Depression in Rising inflation in the s put pressure on the gold standard.
Eventually silver coins approached the point where their metal value would exceed their official face value. Silver coins started disappearing from circulation and there was a shortage of small change. The sizes and appearances stayed the same, and the coins would still work in vending machines, though the weights became a little lighter because copper is less dense than silver.
You can easily tell the difference by looking at coins edge on. Modern Cent. Though the dime is the smallest US coin now, in the past, there were even smaller coins. The modern nickel only came about in , as a response to inflation during the Civil War. Before that, the five cent coin was the tiny silver half dime , which was only about 16 mm in diameter a nickel is 21 mm.
There was an even smaller 3-cent-piece , which was initially 14 mm and 0. The 3-cent-piece was later switched to a copper-nickel alloy one is shown in the picture above of Penny is a colloquial term based on the UK coin. The official name in the US is the cent. Copper is much less valuable than silver by weight, so copper coins typically only contain a fractional portion of their face value as metal. In both the US and UK, copper coins were not legal tender for larger purchases.
If copper-based coins have a lot of metal content, they tend to be impractically bulky, and risked being melted down if the price of copper went up. If the copper content of coins is too light, counterfeiters can make a profit by buying copper and making their own fake coins, which was actually a huge problem in the UK in the s.
The US and UK did both attempt a copper coin where the cost of manufacturing plus the metal value of the copper approximately equaled the value of the coin.
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