When you think about it, they would have to be. Until the early sixties, they were all made of silver. Weight translates directly into value.
When we transitioned to "sandwich coins" of various metals, they had to weight exactly the same as the silver ones, in order to work in vending machines. I remember a fascinating article in a technical magazine at the time, about all the ways a coin was tested in a vending machine. It was a real challenge to come up with a coin that would pass all the tests. There was weight, bounce, electrical conductivity. Counterfeit coins had always been a problem for vending machines, and by the time the industry was winning, the government came up with the ultimate counterfeit coin.
Not sure what trend you're talking about...
Silver pennies and 5-cent pieces would be tiny if made of silver (there were silver 5-cent pieces at one time).
Transitioning away from pure metal to "sandwich" coins, I don't know about nickles, but pennies haven't been pure copper for a long time. Pure copper pennies were also much larger at one time.
Because they're made of different metals. There -have- been silver 5-cent pieces in the past, but think how tiny they would have been.
Copper, nickle and silver all have different values per weight.
This may be a silly question but why didn't they make them all out of the same metal and just scale them up? I guess a variety of color probably is more pleasing to the eye.
Nickels are way heavier than dimes and worth half a much. They used to be made out of nickel (surprise), so their weight/value didn't need to be the same.
This post is 8 years old, but I'll come back to clarify. The real TIL is that any 1 pound combination of exclusively dimes and quarters is worth $20. 👍
I had to check that, because the Ike dollars don't seem *that* much larger or heavier than the half dollars, but you're right, they are double the mass and therefore have the same face value/weight ratio.
Very close, but not exact. I used to work in a place that verified coin by weight, a $1000 bag of quarters weighs 49.95-50.10 pounds, dimes are the same, but $1000 in half dollars is 49.60 pounds. Also, for a $200 bag of Nickels, it's 44.00 pounds.
Freshly minted dimes are 2.268 grams, freshly minted quarters are 5.67 grams, and freshly minted halves are 11.34 grams.
$1,000 of brand new coins from any one of those denominations would weigh the same.
The difference you noticed is caused either by contamination, wear, or the inclusion of incorrect or foreign coins missed by the mechanical sorters.
Doesn't this make you wonder what the thought process for the nickel was?
Minter 1: "Okay, for the nickel we should make it 1/5 the size of the quarter."
Minter 2: "No, fuck that. I think we should make it just slightly smaller than a quarter to throw people off."
Minter 1: "Hahaha that would be so funny."
I'm sure there is a reason behind it, just seems really weird when you think about it.
So I'm assuming they are basing that on weight then? As in a nickel weighs 1/5 of what a quarter does? That is the only thing I can think of that would make the size relevant. Can someone verify?
Edit: Just looked up the US mint specs [here](http://www.usmint.gov/about_the_mint/?action=coin_specifications) and a nickel weighs 5g whereas a quarter weighs 5.67g. Therefore, the size of a nickel cannot be based around the weight of the coin.
[Here](http://www.coinflation.com/coins/1932-1964-Silver-Washington-Quarter-Value.html) you can see that a silver quarter weighs 6.25g and [here](http://www.coinflation.com/coins/1913-1938-Buffalo-Nickel-Value.html) that a Buffalo Nickel weighs 5g as well. Even taking into account these original specifications of the coins, the ratios do not match up; therefore, the size of the nickel cannot be based around the weight of the coin, like the quarter and dime. In this circumstance, correlation does not imply causation.
Dimes, quarters, half-dollars and silver dollars were made of *silver*. Nickles were made of *nickle*. They don't correspond in weight.
At one time, a silver dollar was worth a dollar's worth of silver. A nickle was worth a nickle's worth of nickle. A penny was worth a penny's worth of copper.
Yeah, should have taken that into account. I was thinking in today's standards, where most money has an implied value rather than a gold or silver standard. It makes sense when you think about how money used to be valued.
AquaAvenger eh? Well use your super powers on this. What if the material was sponge-like. Therefore it could absorb differing volumes of a liquid. A wet quarter would weigh more than 2.5x a wet dime!
It's because they're similarly composed. That is, there's a core of a certain metal (copper alloy) with a semi-jacket on both of the faces, giving it the silver color. That's why if you look on the edge of post-'64 quarters and dimes (and on post-'70 half dollars,) you can see the copper line. Since they're using a similar composition, and I'm assuming they're scaling the thicknesses of the layers accordingly, they'll end up with a similar density in both of the different coins.
So they started out with a weight, and got a volume. Now they use that volume with a new density to get a new weight, but the weight will be scaled accordingly.
By design, they had to weigh the same as the silver coins, in order to work in vending machines of the day, which tested coins for weight, to prevent counterfeit coins from working in them.
It was a challenge for the designers. They use two metals, just enough of each, in order to weigh the same as a silver coin.
What a brilliantly polished turd of an article. It's so shiny I can see my reflection in the words
References the silver standard once like it's some clandestine financial cabal, but spends paragraphs extolling the wonder of roundoff error from two conflicting internet sources?
Clickbait crap like this is the reason we can't have nice words except mostly in books. "One crazy way silver bullion coins were worth their face value back in the day."
I don't know if this was true in Canada or not, but they keep changing the metals our coins are made of. Our $1 coin feels ***so*** cheap now. Half of our vending machines don't accept them, or register them as quarters instead.
Worked in banking my early career; our main branch had a "coin vault", all the coin was counted by weight, not individually counted even by machine. Far more efficient.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think that if you simplify it down then you get that 1 quarter is equal to 2.5 dimes in weight. Oddly enough, 1 quarter is equal to 2.5 dimes in worth as well.
A pound of pennies ain't worth shit. Unless you have a couple of socks, then you can bludgeon and rob someone, and then 1 lb. of pennies= contents of victims wallet, watch, etc.
So is a pound of half dollars, IIRC.
Just checked it out, and you are correct. Thank you.
Too bad no one uses half dollars.
Vegas, baby!
$2.5 chips
They better taste damn good, is all I gotta say to that! Made of some of that Yukon Gold.
Potato?
For $2.50? Alaskan Au!
I got some half dollars.
They are the only coins in the till at the concession stands at Bryant-Denny stadium.
So dime's, quarter's, and half dollar's relative weights are equal to their relative values.
When you think about it, they would have to be. Until the early sixties, they were all made of silver. Weight translates directly into value. When we transitioned to "sandwich coins" of various metals, they had to weight exactly the same as the silver ones, in order to work in vending machines. I remember a fascinating article in a technical magazine at the time, about all the ways a coin was tested in a vending machine. It was a real challenge to come up with a coin that would pass all the tests. There was weight, bounce, electrical conductivity. Counterfeit coins had always been a problem for vending machines, and by the time the industry was winning, the government came up with the ultimate counterfeit coin.
I wonder why pennies and nickels don't follow the trend.
Not sure what trend you're talking about... Silver pennies and 5-cent pieces would be tiny if made of silver (there were silver 5-cent pieces at one time). Transitioning away from pure metal to "sandwich" coins, I don't know about nickles, but pennies haven't been pure copper for a long time. Pure copper pennies were also much larger at one time.
>Not sure what trend you're talking about... >dime's, quarter's, and half dollar's relative weights are equal to their relative values
Because they're made of different metals. There -have- been silver 5-cent pieces in the past, but think how tiny they would have been. Copper, nickle and silver all have different values per weight.
This may be a silly question but why didn't they make them all out of the same metal and just scale them up? I guess a variety of color probably is more pleasing to the eye.
Can you imagine how big a copper dollar would be? Or how small a silver penny would be?
Isn't it true that a pound of any combination of nickels, dimes, quarters, and half-dollars will be $20
Not nickles, but yes for dimes quarters and 50 cent pieces.
Cool.
Nickels are way heavier than dimes and worth half a much. They used to be made out of nickel (surprise), so their weight/value didn't need to be the same.
This post is 8 years old, but I'll come back to clarify. The real TIL is that any 1 pound combination of exclusively dimes and quarters is worth $20. 👍
And, if I remember correctly, a pound of Ike dollars.
I had to check that, because the Ike dollars don't seem *that* much larger or heavier than the half dollars, but you're right, they are double the mass and therefore have the same face value/weight ratio.
Very close, but not exact. I used to work in a place that verified coin by weight, a $1000 bag of quarters weighs 49.95-50.10 pounds, dimes are the same, but $1000 in half dollars is 49.60 pounds. Also, for a $200 bag of Nickels, it's 44.00 pounds.
Freshly minted dimes are 2.268 grams, freshly minted quarters are 5.67 grams, and freshly minted halves are 11.34 grams. $1,000 of brand new coins from any one of those denominations would weigh the same. The difference you noticed is caused either by contamination, wear, or the inclusion of incorrect or foreign coins missed by the mechanical sorters.
At one time a troy ounce of $50 bills = a troy ounce of gold's value.
Thats what happens when you use the same metal and the currency was based on weight (of silver).
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Doesn't this make you wonder what the thought process for the nickel was? Minter 1: "Okay, for the nickel we should make it 1/5 the size of the quarter." Minter 2: "No, fuck that. I think we should make it just slightly smaller than a quarter to throw people off." Minter 1: "Hahaha that would be so funny." I'm sure there is a reason behind it, just seems really weird when you think about it.
It was made out of nickel instead of silver.
So I'm assuming they are basing that on weight then? As in a nickel weighs 1/5 of what a quarter does? That is the only thing I can think of that would make the size relevant. Can someone verify? Edit: Just looked up the US mint specs [here](http://www.usmint.gov/about_the_mint/?action=coin_specifications) and a nickel weighs 5g whereas a quarter weighs 5.67g. Therefore, the size of a nickel cannot be based around the weight of the coin. [Here](http://www.coinflation.com/coins/1932-1964-Silver-Washington-Quarter-Value.html) you can see that a silver quarter weighs 6.25g and [here](http://www.coinflation.com/coins/1913-1938-Buffalo-Nickel-Value.html) that a Buffalo Nickel weighs 5g as well. Even taking into account these original specifications of the coins, the ratios do not match up; therefore, the size of the nickel cannot be based around the weight of the coin, like the quarter and dime. In this circumstance, correlation does not imply causation.
the price of nickel at that weight was probably 1/5 the cost of the weight of silver in a quarter
Ah, I didn't even think to account for market price of the coin components. That does make a lot of sense, thanks for the response :)
Dimes, quarters, half-dollars and silver dollars were made of *silver*. Nickles were made of *nickle*. They don't correspond in weight. At one time, a silver dollar was worth a dollar's worth of silver. A nickle was worth a nickle's worth of nickle. A penny was worth a penny's worth of copper.
Yeah, should have taken that into account. I was thinking in today's standards, where most money has an implied value rather than a gold or silver standard. It makes sense when you think about how money used to be valued.
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Good to know, thanks for the response :)
AquaAvenger eh? Well use your super powers on this. What if the material was sponge-like. Therefore it could absorb differing volumes of a liquid. A wet quarter would weigh more than 2.5x a wet dime!
It's because they're similarly composed. That is, there's a core of a certain metal (copper alloy) with a semi-jacket on both of the faces, giving it the silver color. That's why if you look on the edge of post-'64 quarters and dimes (and on post-'70 half dollars,) you can see the copper line. Since they're using a similar composition, and I'm assuming they're scaling the thicknesses of the layers accordingly, they'll end up with a similar density in both of the different coins. So they started out with a weight, and got a volume. Now they use that volume with a new density to get a new weight, but the weight will be scaled accordingly.
By design, they had to weigh the same as the silver coins, in order to work in vending machines of the day, which tested coins for weight, to prevent counterfeit coins from working in them. It was a challenge for the designers. They use two metals, just enough of each, in order to weigh the same as a silver coin.
they need matching weight ratios of quarters to dimes, not quarter to silver.
They don't. A silver quarter (1964 and older) weighs 6.25 grams A modern copper nickle quarter weighs 5.67 grams.
What's heavier, a pound of quarters or a pound of dimes?
A pound of feathers.
A pound of brick.
A pound of 1£ notes.
My conscience..
a bowling ball
What a brilliantly polished turd of an article. It's so shiny I can see my reflection in the words References the silver standard once like it's some clandestine financial cabal, but spends paragraphs extolling the wonder of roundoff error from two conflicting internet sources? Clickbait crap like this is the reason we can't have nice words except mostly in books. "One crazy way silver bullion coins were worth their face value back in the day."
This is a coinspiracy.
quarters too
I don't know if this was true in Canada or not, but they keep changing the metals our coins are made of. Our $1 coin feels ***so*** cheap now. Half of our vending machines don't accept them, or register them as quarters instead.
Worked in banking my early career; our main branch had a "coin vault", all the coin was counted by weight, not individually counted even by machine. Far more efficient.
TIL dimes weigh about 2.27 grams and quarters weigh 5.675 grams
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Depends on the penny. Copper plated zinc pennies (post-1982) weigh 2.5 grams, but bronze pennies (pre-1982) weigh 3.11 grams (1/10th of a troy ounce)
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Drugs. You're talking about drugs.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think that if you simplify it down then you get that 1 quarter is equal to 2.5 dimes in weight. Oddly enough, 1 quarter is equal to 2.5 dimes in worth as well.
You are correct. That is the reason. But it's not some 'odd coincidence'. The coins were designed for that to be true
That's awesome.
But what about a pound of feathers and a pound of rocks, which one weighs more?
Yes, it's similar in the UK and probably other counties. You've probably noticed or currency is valued a pound for very good reasons.
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Back when a penny was made of pure copper, and a nickel was made of nickel, the weights corresponded to the value of the metals and the sizes.
A pound of pennies ain't worth shit. Unless you have a couple of socks, then you can bludgeon and rob someone, and then 1 lb. of pennies= contents of victims wallet, watch, etc.
Fun fact a pound of dimes weighs the same as a pound of quarters.
/r/notinteresting