How can you tell...

Placid

The denomination of this coin other than someone telling you?

dddangerousdan

size

DAN

Placid

So back when it was used if I said it was a dime you just had to belive me until you could measure it if you had no coins to compare it with?

DirtroadRider

Half Dime,Flowing Hair Type 1794-1795
How about maybe a VF-20

Placid

Actually it's a au58 per NGC. I just wondered how people then could tell it was a half dime and not a dime other than to measure it or compare it with other coins?

Does the head face a different direction, marked on the rim, or is there some other way to identify it?

dddangerousdan

Nope they are basically the same. you just had to see them both to know which was which.

DAN

darktone

Well the dime is twice as big as the half dime and I think they were the same size as most of the colonial coinage so people were used to telling the difference between the sizes of coins. Thats just my guess . mike

itsnotjustme

I don't know what the population was back then, but I suspect most early US citizens never saw one of those. Foreign coins were haevily used until what, the mid-1800s?

dddangerousdan

with 3.8 mil people in 1790, and only 86,000 minted, it is a good bet most people never saw them

DAN

lordmarcovan

It's easy to distinguish a half dime from a dime, even on the early ones. In the case of the Flowing Hair/Draped Bust issues, you're talking about 16.5 mm versus 19 mm. Doesn't sound like much difference, but very easy for the eye to distinguish if you saw them in circulation. As collectors who seldom see them at all, let alone in circulation, we also can tell that's not a dime (disme) because no dismes were struck until 1796, and they had the Draped Bust design, not the Flowing Hair.

It is true that foreign coins far outnumbered our own coinage in circulation, well until 1857 when they were demonetized. It wasn't until after the Civil War that the Mint began to produce enough coinage for commercial purposes. The US coinage was not the exact same size as colonial issues, as it was a different standard. Our dollar was patterned after the Spanish Milled dollar, yes, but it was broken into decimal parts rather than 8 reales. Therefore, this little half dime was not worth quite as much as its contemporary counterpart in circulation; the Spanish colonial half real, which was worth about 6.5 cents. The copper that circulated at the time seems to have been mostly British halfpennies, whereas the silver was Spanish, from Mexico City, usually.

The finds I have made with my metal detector bear this out. However, it was a hodgepodge: on a plantation site from the 1790-1810 period, I found three colonial coins: one was British (made for Ireland), one French (made for Cayenne), and one Spanish (struck in Mexico city). They were only a few feet away from each other, and it is not hard to imagine them in the same pocket. It must have been interesting to shop with such a mixture! I wish I could say I'd found US coinage from the 1790's, but the closest I've come to that is one dateless 1796-1807 Draped cent, too corroded to read. After that, the earliest US coin I've dug is an 1829 half dime. An acquaintance of mine did find a beautiful, VF 1800 Draped dime near here, though. I'm green with envy. It might take me years, but I'll find one. A whole lot more reales and King George coppers will turn up first, though.

LanLord

Weren't the coin values shown on the edge of coins in the very earliest of types? While this is of no use in a slab, you could see it raw.

FC57Coins

According to my "free" red book which I just got from Heritage, half dimes had reeded edges at this time - both for the flowing hair and drapped bust varieties, so the denomination wasn't anywhere to be found on the coins - you must've had to establish it by size. The denomination didn't appear until the capped bust variety came out in 1829 then. Gotta keep in mind too that with all the different types of coins circulating in those days, the likelyhood was that coins were judged more by weight and composition to determine their value, therefore they probably had no real problem assigning a value based on the size and the fact that it was silver.

Frank

Conder101

Well the bust is too large for it to be a half dollar or a dollar and they didn't make dimes or quarters that year so it has to be a half dime.

Basicly though they were told apart by size. That was a holdover from the british traditions. The first british coin to state its denomination was the half penny of 1799. I don't believe the larger denominations appear on the british coins until around 1816. We were british colonies and on that point we followed their example.

dorkkarl

you gotta remember that when that coin was in circ., citizens were more in tune with the value of silver, basically on a spot basis. in other words, paper money was hardly used at all, so using coins all the time, one quickly became very familiar w/ the size and would have had no trouble telling them apart. also, contemporary w/ that coin, were many foreign coins which would be valued on the basis of size too. so a silver coin from, say Germany, would be valud roughly at 5 cents (i think your coin is a half-dime). ie. size of the coin (meaning amt of silver content) actually was more important in determining value than a listed denomination. one had to be able to value coins (ie. the foreign ones) immediately based on size in day-to-day transactions.

this is how i understand it!

K S