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How was bullion counted in the early days?
topstuf
Posts: 14,803 ✭✭✭✭✭
A very interesting post that deals with something I've never thought about:
prompts me to ask how bullion WAS counted in the days of its being coined and distributed in trade?
Was there a "standard" weight or unit that was considered as internationally known?
Did people just look at their pile of ...coins... and say "a lot" or how was it referred to in those days?
I talked to a refiner in the 1980s who said that .999 was the "sticker" in refining. He said it was relatively easy to get it CLOSE to .999 but that the last little bit was tough.
Googled and found this but about as close an answer as I can find regarding that last step.
https://www.finishing.com/62/62.shtml
I love the posts that make me curious. 
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Could you define "counted"? I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to query.
You are talking about fineness afterwards which is different than "counted".
Coins were typically weighed on a balance. Most stores probably had one with weights of common gold and silver types. This is also an anti-counterfeiting measure. Those weights themselves are collectible these days.
There were multiple standards used and merchants were familiar with the French, British, Spanish and American standards as those coins were used into the 1850s. Merchants used conversion charts (also collectible in the ephemera market) for the common standrds.
Chop marks come to mind.
Either by hand or on those huge balances at the Mint. Answer is probably in one of RWB's books!
There are old bars still around and they have a fineness stamped into them when poured. Pretty easy to just put on a scale and use your slide rule to figure things out (really olden days they used an abacus I believe). Before that I don't think they cared.
bob
I visited Romania in1982 and at that time they still used an abacus in the store to calculate the bill.
I count my bullion in ounces, not sure there is another way. I suppose I could count by $ too but at this point number of ounces is sufficient.
The whole worlds off its rocker, buy Gold™.
In Japan, I had store keepers use a Soroban (Japanese abacus) to convert yen to US dollars. As far as I know, planchets were weighed on a simple balance scale...well it was accurate to the gram.
"Keep your malarkey filter in good operating order" -Walter Breen
Bank tellers in China used abacuses well into the 1980's. And they were faster with those than the teller machines people tried to sell them.
From the responses I guess I wasn't clear what I was asking.
I am curious if there was a "standard" ...accepted and universal.... fineness for what is and was called, "silver" back in the days of actual precious metal usage for trading and saving.
I know ALL about modern bullion weight and troy, avoirdupois vs pennyweight, gram, etc.
I am just wondering if people who saved ..."MONEY" ....(read bullion in commerce) in olden times had a yardstick for their holdings.
Were "coins" weighed on balance scales as I suspect, and, if so, were they sorted by fineness?
Not talking MODERN BULLION.
"Bullion" as in quantities of Pillar Dollars or such. Along with the merchants who would take British Shillings right alongside the Spanish standards.
No, there was no standard outside of the country you were in at the moment. England was .925 fine. US .900 fine on coinage and some were other percentages. Silver was not .999 fine as .95 or .995 was the usual here in the US. As long as the bar was marked with the maker (you could determine the odds of it being an accurate measurement) and the percentage you could calculate the rest.
Back in the 19th century bars were marked just to what they were. IE: .880, or .915, etc. The assayers were pretty accurate. Sometimes you would see the gold content in the silver bar as well as the silver content. Although that was less common and not often seen.
Look at the old bars in the back of the Red Book and you see typical markings with maker and percentages as well as weight.
bob
As some have said, each county tended to have their own standard fineness. For example, if you were in London I don't think they felt that .925 was any less legitimate than .999 (if that existed back then). They used what they knew. I am sure that allowances were made for relative values between coins of varying size and fineness.
Although, I suppose not all silver coins were created equal in the eyes of many merchants, hence the issuance of the US Trade Dollar.
And how did someone with varied piles of "payment" assess their holdings?
Good question. Did they calculate the total in .999 silver? I am guessing not. I suspect they just totaled the # of US silver dollars, # 8 reales, # Maria Theresia takers, etc.
The commercial market price of gold and silver was based on pure metal - 1.000 fine. But this was no a practical purity and was used only for checking against normal assay results. In the US, 1.000 fine gold was called "proof gold" and was very expensive to make.
As others noted, native and refined gold and other precious metals were assayed and the cast bars stamped with weight and purity on the basis of 1.000 fine. The value depended on local fixing of the price of gold in relation to local currency. Until the early 19th century, Troy weight was the most commonly used, but ti was by no means universal, and there were no meaningful international standards on what constituted a "Troy ounce." In the 1830s the French metric system began to be accepted and major economies gradually adopted standard kilogram weights. Gold was then measured in grams and "X" grams of pure gold was "Y" the value of some unit of money.
Until about 1845, refining and assaying were not especially accurate or repeatable, so receiving merchants often had their own assays performed on gold they took in payment. At one time there was a minor diplomatic fuss between US and Britain over gold assay. The Americans claimed British sovereigns were "off" and the Brits said they were perfect.Turned out the US assayers were correct. (It might also be added that assaying was not a straight forward processes in Britain and there is a short but difficult discussion by William DuBoise (I think) on understanding British assays of American gold.
When I worked in semiconductors, making electronic chips, the raw silicon wafers we started with were 9 / 9 meaning
99.9999999% pure silicon, or 1 non silicon atom out of 1 billion silicon atoms, and yes, it does make a difference.
A limiting factor becomes a mesh between the ability of the smelter to make something "pure" and the ability of the measuring equipment to measure at that level.
Remember, naturally occurring silver (47 Ag) is composed of the two stable isotopes 107Ag and 109Ag with 107Ag being the more abundant (51.839%). So, even excluding all trace contaminants, one could have almost a 2% variance in the "purity" of silver, being measured on a volume versus mass ratio by modulating the ratio of 107 ag and 109 ag.
Gold only has 1 natural isotope 197au.
Oh, and if you want to make your gold coins or bullion theft proof, a good dose of radiation, adding on 1 neutron per atom to bump it to 198au, makes a really nasty mid range half life (2000+ days) very lethal gamma emitter, worse than a salted cobalt jacket.
Give the gift that keeps on giving.
The things we did with our own little nuclear reactor, hmm, good thing the statue of limitations is over on most of it.
As far as counting back then, I believe it was done in common numerics... i.e. $457 dollars in silver...$293 in gold.... different types of silver - reales etc - would have the common exchange and be counted/converted to dollars. Cheers, RickO