Weight and volume of $1,000 gold and silver dollars
RogerB
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This is a little hard to read but shows the practical side of sending coins around the country in 1924.
Mary O'Reilly, who signed this document, was the de facto "director of the mint" although Robert Grant had the title and salary.
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Comments
2.75 cubic feet!
Thanks for the research @RogerB it’s the supplemental things of storage and transportation that can easily be overlooked when your primary purpose is to mint coins.
Similar to what can/does occur now. While shopping you see a special on a 85” HDTV. Buy it. Then you realize your CAR is a Fortwo.
Wish I had that kind of storage/transportation problem with gold, though...
Thank you, this answers a question that I have had for a long time.
In 1949 the San Francisco Mint struck 2,000,000 Mexican silver dollars which were to be shipped to Nationalist China. The coins were taken to the Bank of America and stored in the vaults there to await shipment. The Communists took over China and the coins were taken back to the mint and melted.
I always wondered how much space would be needed to store the coins. I did some math and came up with a number close to yours of 250 cubic feet (for 1,000,000 coins similar in size to US dollars).
One wonders what the bank's storage fee would have been for the coins.
The Mysterious Egyptian Magic Coin
Coins in Movies
Coins on Television
Now let's calculate just how much is in Scrooge McDuck's Money Bin!
It's nice that the Western Railway President's Committee on Public Relations was in the "Transportation Building." Must have made finding the office much easier on Monday mornings.
Volume of $1,000,000 in silver dollars is actually smaller than I imagined. It's a cube roughly 6.3 feet to a side. I could put it right here where my desk is. I imagine the roughly 60,000 pounds is more of an issue.
Thanks Roger...helps to put things in perspective. Of course the storage space, as pointed out, was really dependent on the containers.... burlap sacks being in favor at the time (I think)....However, there could have been other containers used... Cheers, RickO
"Cotton duck" or "canvas" bags. Burlap was not strong enough.