Interesting Coin Trivia

RedRocket

Probably AI generated yet read an interesting tidbit of coin trivia.
If every single United States Lincoln cent that had been minted (with none lost to wear or damage) were randomly mixed and dispersed into a large vat it would take on average 30,000 bags of 5,000 cents each before the first 1909-S VDB cent was found. That vat would also need to be the size of five Olympic sized swimming pools. It would then take 580,000 bags of 5,000 cents each before the first 1955/55 was located.
Any other coin trivia that would amaze us?

oldabeintx

Guess I’ll stop looking at my change.

ksmooter61

So you're saying I've got a chance...

TPring

Keeping in the cent category...

Lincoln was the first President quoted as saying not to believe everything you read on the internet.

True story.

braddick

@TPring said:
Keeping in the cent category...

Lincoln was the first President quoted as saying not to believe everything you read on the internet.

True story.

There is a 100% chance you are 50% incorrect.

jacrispies

Assuming this was calculated with only mintage statistics, the fact that most 1909-S V.D.B.s are retained in collections and not spent for face value drastically lowers those odds of finding one in change.

Too many things at play to accurately verify this information quickly. As for now, it is a nifty "factoid".

oldabeintx

The chance of finding either coin using modern technology is 100%. The chance of finding either in the wild today is probably about the same as being struck by lightning, probably worse actually. Yet I admire those who try, sort of.

cladking

@ksmooter61 said:
So you're saying I've got a chance...

Buy a lottery ticket or just look for something no one else is.

cladking

@jacrispies said:
Assuming this was calculated with only mintage statistics, the fact that most 1909-S V.D.B.s are retained in collections and not spent for face value drastically lowers those odds of finding one in change.

Too many things at play to accurately verify this information quickly. As for now, it is a nifty "factoid".

The Numismatist some years back calculated more than 90% of the S VDB were gone before WW II.

messydesk

@RedRocket said:
Probably AI generated yet read an interesting tidbit of coin trivia.
If every single United States Lincoln cent that had been minted (with none lost to wear or damage) were randomly mixed and dispersed into a large vat it would take on average 30,000 bags of 5,000 cents each before the first 1909-S VDB cent was found. That vat would also need to be the size of five Olympic sized swimming pools. It would then take 580,000 bags of 5,000 cents each before the first 1955/55 was located.
Any other coin trivia that would amaze us?

Starting with AI-supplied number of 450,000,000,000 Lincoln cents ever made. Assuming they're stacked optimally (laid out in layers of hexagonal patterns), each would occupy 0.0292 cubic inches, the total volume would be 13.15 billion cubic inches, which comes out to 215.5 million liters, which is a little over 86 Olympic sized pools (660,000 gallons or 2.5 Ml each).

If the assumption that 1 coin out of every 580,000 bags of 5,000 cents is a 55 DDO, then that comes out to only 155 that ever existed. Likewise, only 3,000 09-S VDBs ever existed. We know the mintage of the 09-S to be 484,000, so it should "only" be one coin out of every 1,860 bags for those. According to CoinFacts, 24,000 55 DDOs were released into circulation, so this would be one coin for every 3,750 bags of the total Lincoln cent mintage.