Talk:United States Mint coin sizes

Intent of this page

I've personally been curious, recently, about the relative sizes of different US coins. Though I have many of the older coins in my personal collection, I haven't been able to get a firm grasp on just how big, or how small, some of them are (I'm also hindered by the fact that most of the more valuable ones are in holders). For people who've never even seen older coins, it becomes even harder to truly "feel" what these coins were like, if their only exposure is pictures in a book (or wiki).

I'm hoping that this chart might help to drive home the changes in coin size and composition, as well as the various types of coin (copper, copper/nickel, silver, gold) that used to be in circulation all at the same time. In Europe, with the new Euro coinage, the general public has sort of the old "tri-metal" feel in the three groups of coin metals being used. However, in the US we haven't had such a wholesale overhaul of coinage, and many of the coin sizes, which were originally dictated by their precious metal content, seem arbitrary and archaic.

So hopefully this'll help better illustrate what used to circulate, and how today's coins are only a fraction of the variety of coinage we've produced in the past. Dschuetz 03:51, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Notes

I couldn't find, in wikipedia, images of any of the regular "eagle" series (quarter, half, full, and double eagles), other than paired obverse/reverse images. I also couldn't find the large cent. I found very nice images at the Smithsonian, and updated two (LargeCent-1823.jpg and CappedBust-HalfEagle-1803.jpg), but they were on a colored background and didn't fill the frame, so they didn't resize proportionally to the other coins on the page and looked out of place. Hopefully we can find some good images of those coins to add.

For resizing the coins, I estimated typical monitor density at 92dpi, and figured that a factor of 3.622 would neatly convert mm to pixels. It seems reasonably close, if perhaps a little small, on my monitor. If there's a better way to do that, great, but if not, please be sure new images are properly scaled -- after all, a scaled comparison is the whole point of the page!

I considered merging the images with the composition information, but I'm afraid that'd be too cluttered.

For some coin series, I had to pick one of several dimensions/weights, generally going with the best-known or last-used specifications.

I considered adding coin thickness to the table, but didn't have good information on all coins' thicknesses.

Another possible comparison might be simple circles, side-by-side, showing each coin series in ascending size. Limiting that to only currently circulating coins (and maybe commemoratives/bullion issues) would produce an image that'd fit well in a page and could be compared against similar simplifications for other nations' coinage.

If the table appears too wide, perhaps the platinum bullion series could be dropped, with a note added indicating that the platinum coins match the gold coins in size.

The table appears fairly sparse, especially in the lower third of it, but I really couldn't see grouping many of those coins in the same row, as there's a 2mm or more difference between many of them.

The images of the bullion coins is deceiving, in that they are taken at a slightly oblique angle and show a lot of the lower edge of the coin, so its appearance (especially the $1 silver in comparison with silver dollars) might not be as accurate as it should be.

I'm sure that there are plenty of other shortcomings that I've forgotten. Still, hopefully this'll spark other people's interest and this can be improved upon, and maybe even applied to other nations' coinage. I sort of like being able to see so many historical coin series at a glance. Dschuetz 03:51, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

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