incredible platinum 12 ruble coming up for auction...

Doogy

drool.....you don't see these every day! I'll betcha' that reserve of 50,000 euros gets smashed pretty quickly too. Get more than a couple collectors of rare Russian coins in the same room, and this thing will bring moon money.

click here

mudskippie

wow, nice coin hideous holder

ASUtodd

Maybe I'm missing something...but I didn't know they had Platinum coins in the 1800's... I always thought Platinum was a hard metal to strike a coin in so I guess my thinking was they didn't have the means to make Platinum coins back then..... I guess this makes sense because there was a huge discovery of Platinum in Russia in 1822 (Ural Mountains). Learn something new everyday...

SaorAlba

They experimented with it in Russia as an alternative to minting gold coins. Of course they did have striking problems etc, coupled with the fact that nobody cared to have platinum coins over gold. Gold was familiar - people do not change in their emotion because of some bureaucratic fool in some government office. The coins were actually minted over a few years in Sankt Petrburg, but never in large mintages. Until platinum commemorative coins were minted by the USSR in the run up to the 1980 Olympics, they were the only significant platinum coinage ever attempted before.

Cladiator

Very cool. Is it 90%? What's the actual platinum content?

GritsMan

That is neat--and interesting. I, too, had no idea of such an early platinum coin.

Sapyx

Russia experimented with platinum coins because it had a large natural source of platinum - there are rivers in the Ural Mountains filled with nuggets of the stuff, and that area is still the world's second-largest source of it world-wide. I suspect they made coins out of platinum simply because they couldn't think of any other practical use for it.

They had to make the face values of the coins quite high, too. If cheap platinum got into the hands of forgers, they could make fake gold-plated coins of near-accurate weight, because platinum is one of the few metals with similar density to gold.

Krause lists the weight of the 12 roubles at 41.41 grams, 1.3311 ounces APW. That works out by my reckoning to a fineness of .9998.

While the large 6 and 12 rouble coin mintages number in the mere hundreds, the smaller 3 roubles have mintages high enough for me to at least dream of owning one.