Percentage of good gold and silver coins
RogerB
Posts: 8,852 ✭✭✭✭✭
This brief letter will be of interest to those wondering just how much of all the precious metals sent to the Mints was converted into coins.
Mint of the United States at Philadelphia, Pa.,
SUPERINTENDENT’S OFFICE.
July 11, 1882
R. E. Preston, Esq.
Acting Director of the Mint
Washington, D. C.
Sir:
In reply to your letter of the 8th inst. I herewith enclose statement of percentage of coin produced
from gold and silver operated upon by the Coiner for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1882:
Bullion Value of amt operated on:
Gold $140,038,224.91;
Silver $22,782,046.64
Amt coin produced:
Gold $59,678,437.50
Silver $11,062,388.75
Percentage of coin produced from amount operated on:
Gold - 43%
Silver - 49%
Very respectfully
Your obedient servant
L. R. Cowperthwaite,
Acting Superintendent
The "amount operated on" was the value of ingots sent to the Coining Dept, and the "percentage of coin" was the value of good coins delivered to the Superintendent. Metal not made into coins was returned to the Melting & Refining Department, combined with new metal and alloy, and recast into new ingots.
The Acting Superintendent, clerk L. R. Cowperthwaite, was the cousin of Philadelphia artist Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins for whom Anna W. Williams ("the girl NOT on the silver dollar") was an occasional model.
Comments
Thanks for sharing the research info. Interesting.
what the heck happened to the rest of the silver & gold?
BHNC #203
Hard to tell how their valuations are calculated....
But it appears the bullion is valued by weight, and the coinage by face value? That would seem to indicate that the percentages they calculate are actually rather optimistic, given that the face value of the coinage is somewhat in excess of the weight of the bullion in them??
The bullion value and coin value have an identical base - $20.6667/troy ounce.
Rolling and cutting scrap, mistrikes and other defective pieces were returned to M&R for melting and incorporation into fresh coinage ingots.
Tis confusing. Let us say for the sake of easy math that 50% of every melt batch comes out as good coin, with the rest being the webbing that the blanks were punched out of, plus any mis-struck or inadequately struck coins that go back into the melting pot.
Operate on a batch of gold worth $100,000 as bullion and you get $50,000 in good coin. Operate on the remaining $50,000 worth of bullion and you get $25,000 in good coin. Operate on the remaining $25,000 worth of bullion and you get $12,500 in good coin. Etc., though the lots don't really keep getting smaller and smaller because as you say the leftovers are combined with new gold and new alloy to keep batches at optimum sizes.
The point is that at this point you have operated on $175,000 worth of gold and created $87,500 worth of coins.
I would be happy to listen to any other interpretation. I am just making this up as I go along. Your mileage may vary.
You mileage look very good to me.
The other productivity number was percentage of good coins made from accepted planchets. This was what told the officers how good the coining process was.
The amount of bullion doesn't increase each time you operate. The original amount was $100k, so in the situation you described, you got $87,500 in coin from $100k in bullion. In each of your steps, the amount of bullion (i.e. $50k) is still a part of the original $100k, it doesn't get added to the total.
mbogoman
https://pcgs.com/setregistry/collectors-showcase/classic-issues-colonials-through-1964/zambezi-collection-trade-dollars/7345Asesabi Lutho
But they operated on that particular gold three different times to get to this place. In the original letter, what does "operated on" really mean?
From the 1912 Annual Report:
"The percentage of [gold] coin produced [at Philadelphia] to the amount of metal operated upon was 28.69 per cent.
"This low percentage was due to a low-grade gold which had not passed through the mint refinery and the coinage of a large amount of half eagles, and all .quarter eagles without adjusting the blanks, the pieces being weighed only after coinage, and those found above
or below the tolerance returned to the melting pot. The design of these two denominations will not allow any shaving or filing of the blanks. A large percentage of the gold delivered to the superintendent at settlement consisted of unfinished coin and blanks."
Here's an example of planchet-to-coin productivity for 1909-S Double Eagles:
"These data reveal a remarkable 98.07 percent of the planchets struck produced good coins. This is the highest success rate known for U.S. mints of this era, and is unusual in that it applies to one of the largest production runs of double eagles in the Saint-Gaudens coinage era. It is also interesting to note that reverse die #5 was used for 436,374 pieces or about fifteen percent of the total struck."
"Operated on" refers to the bullion weight of ingots transferred into the Coining Dept. Whatever was no made into coins, was then transferred out and back to M&R. In M&R it was melted with more gold+alloy and fresh ingots cast.
Which confirms that the statistics are meaningless if we do not know what the terms mean.
Undefined term of any sort are meaningless.
The US Mint productivity percentages are excellent representations of how much product is produced from each batch of raw material. Improvement comes from understanding this and changing operations/methodology to increase output without increasing labor.
It would seem, from the above descriptions of the process, that ample opportunity for 'shrinkage' (the term often applied to theft/loss in retail) in gold existed.... Where humans are involved, loss will occur when opportunity is presented. Cheers, RickO
There was (is) a legal maximum that can be lost during various processing steps. US Mints were commonly at 1/4 to 1/10 of this legal limit. Any loss beyond typical triggered an investigation. I don't recall reading about any mint whose gold or silver loss was remotely close to the legal limit.