We handle money every day–though perhaps not as much of it as we would like–but we’re more interested in what the coins and bills will buy than how they are made (except, of course, for the new two-dollar coin, which we like to throw, hammer and jump up and down on, on the off chance it might come apart).
It’s a shameful way to treat something that has so much science–and art!–behind it, as any numismatician will tell you.
The words “money” and “mint” both come from the Latin “moneta,” a surname of the goddess Juno, whose temple in Rome was used for coining money.
The oldest coins we know of were made in the sixth century B.C. in the district of Lied in Asia Minor. Under the Greeks, coin-making became an art, with artisans striving to make their city-state’s currency the most beautiful. (Governments still strive to make their money as attractive as possible; it is, after all, the ultimate form of government advertising.) The Romans ended the resulting confusion by standardizing their coins and banning unauthorized minting.
In the Middle Ages, very kind of local authority again minted its own coin, but Roman-like standardization returned with the growth of large, modern nations.
Originally, coins were made of precious metal and were worth whatever the metal they contained was worth. We’ve “outgrown” this quaint notion: our coins are properly called “token coins”–they’re valuable only because the government says they are, just like our paper money.
To make a coin, you first melt metal and cast it into bars, which are then rolled into strips of uniform thickness and quality. Machines punch disks called planchets out of these strips. These planchets have to be exactly the right weight; if they’re too heavy, they can be filed down, but if they’re too light, they’re rejected and recast. (Weight is crucially important, as anyone who has tried to use a Canadian coin in a southern U.S. vending machine knows.) The rims of the planchets are then rolled again; this rises a little lip around the edge of the coin, to prevent wear. Finally, the planchets are cleaned, then struck by dies to imprint the “heads” and “tails.” The edges of some coins are then grooved to aid handling.
Until the mid 1990s, our half-dollar, quarter and dime were made of nickel, our nickel of a copper-nickel alloy, and our penny of bronze. Now all of these coins are made of steel, the penny plated with copper and the rest with nickel. (This change saves millions of dollars annually.) The two-dollar coin features an outer ring of nickel and an aluminum-bronze core.
Paper money, at first glance, looks easier to make; it’s just a fancy job if printing, right? True–but it’s a very fancy job. Whole teams of engravers labors over each design, and the paper is specially made to withstand rough handling.
When paper money changes its look, as ours has several times, it’s almost always more to thwart counterfeiters than for aesthetic reasons. A couple of decades ago, Canadian money suddenly went multi-colored, and started boasting Spirograph-like spirals, for that very reason. But modern scanners and photocopiers can easily reproduce even such complicated designs, so more changes are necessary. The little shiny patch on the $20 bill, for example, is made of color-shifting ink, which reflects different wavelengths depending on what angle you view it from, which really confuses a scanner.
The new $10 bill has a number of anti-counterfeiting features, including intaglio (raised ink), iridescent maple leafs, and a hidden number (hold the note at eye level and tilt it at a 45-degree angle, and you’ll see the number 10). Other anti-counterfeiting features on Canadian bank notes include fluorescence (certain features glow under ultraviolet light), microprinting that’s too small to be copied, extremely fine lines, again very difficult to copy, and hard-to-reproduce colors.
You could put a bar-code patch on each bill, derived mathematically from the serial number, which a scanner could read to verify the bill was genuine. It would work, but the public probably wouldn’t accept it: not only would it erode the anonymity of cash transactions, it would make the express check-out lines at the supermarket even longer.
The paper could be changed, too: Australia has already introduced a plastic bill. Plastic lasts longer and could have more special anti-counterfeiting elements embedded in it, such as optical fibers, capsules, polymer beads or radar-reflective dust.
Buy anything governments can come up with, counterfeiters can eventually copy. The best governments can hope for is to stay one step ahead.
At least no one is suggesting we return to the earliest form of paper money in Canada, modified playing cards which were used to pay French soldiers.
Although, considering the gambling possibilities–it just might come up.
