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The Earliest Known "Certified" Coins.
braddick
Posts: 25,238 ✭✭✭✭✭
I came upon this certification and that it was cool. Is this perhaps 'certified' even before ANACS came into existence?
I thought I would share and get your take/opinion of this:
The back is blank.
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The paper says copyright 1992 so that makes the point moot.
In honor of the memory of Cpl. Michael E. Thompson
The certificate of authenticity looks so shady that it brings doubt to the coin.
What are the certifying? Possessing it certifies ownership.
They didn't grade it or anything.
Is it just a circulated mercury dime? Wonder how much they charged with the certificate compared to market price
Llamas and alpacas are camels. They aren't like camels, or related. They are camels. When was anyone going to tell me this?! How long had Bill Nye been holding out on us?
United States commemorative Fine Art Gallery is a coin retailer.
They seem to be similar to littleton coin where it's clear to everyone that the products are overpriced junk.
Llamas and alpacas are camels. They aren't like camels, or related. They are camels. When was anyone going to tell me this?! How long had Bill Nye been holding out on us?
I do like that the certificate refers to the “winged liberty” dime, as it should. I’ve never understood why we all call it a Mercury dime. The Roman deity Mercury also wore a winged hat, but had nothing to do with liberty. I’ll have to research that someday.
it has no grade
It doesn't reference the date of the coin in the holder.
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I can't speak to when they first came along, but that looks like the same kind of COA with some background info you'd find with a catalog or TV spot, or some other source marketing to the public instead of collectors. Tom's point noting the copyright date notwithstanding, I wouldn't call this certified any more than I'd call any coin with an aftermarket COA (which is arguably worth no more than the paper it's written on) certified.
Now with that said, I offer this fun piece from my collection. Not the first, but apropos to the topic at hand...
I think it's fair to say that actual coin collectors were not the target market here. There are two things that coin collectors will almost universally find to be very important about a coin they own, or want to buy: the date, and the mintmark (or lack thereof). And this "certificate" does not mention either of those facts.
In 1992, the price of the silver in a silver dime was about 28 cents. The certificate claims that the "average increase in value" of a silver dime is 1000%, from which I suppose we're supposed to infer that this "average" silver dime should be worth $1. But I would presume the excessive price increases of rarities like the 1916-D help bump up this "average" statistic, so perhaps they're not technically lying, but still, they almost certainly took a bullion-value (28 cents) silver dime, wrapped it in a few cents worth of cardboard and plastic, and sold it for $1 plus shipping. Standard MO for these mass-marketing coin sellers.
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations"
Apparently I have been awarded the DPOTD twice.
Well, that ruins that.
(Tough to read on the paper itself, yet sure enough, easy to read on the photo!)
Thanks Tom for blowing my buzz!
(kidding.)
I agree Littleton is overpriced, but disagree they sell junk. I love buying their stuff on the secondary market - they do a good job of weeding out problem coins.
As has been established, the "certificate" shown is meaningless promotional paper. The concept of a third party certifying a coin as being authentic only precedes ANA photo certs in the form of letters from disinterested experts or the U.S. government. There have been letters from the mint in the 19th century stating authenticity in response to people sending them a coin asking if it is counterfeit. I highly doubt that any of these responses have been kept with the coin in question for 125+ years, since the inquiries were most likely made by people unfamiliar with designs that just wanted to spend them. I do recall seeing one that detailed hub differences on Morgan dollars during 1878, however, so there may have been collector interaction in some cases.
Keeper of the VAM Catalog • Professional Coin Imaging • Prime Number Set • World Coins in Early America • British Trade Dollars • Variety Attribution
Always found this one interesting from the Mint in 1887 regarding the Dexter 1804 dollar.
Wonder if the documents (last publicly offered in the 1981 auction) have turned up since the 2017 auction.
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The Legendary Dexter Specimen of the 1804 Dollar
Discovered in Germany in 1884
Class I, Original
1804 Draped Bust Silver Dollar. Class I Original. Bowers Borckardt-304. Rarity-7. Proof-65 (PCGS)
https://auctions.stacksbowers.com/lots/view/3-6QOWX/1804-draped-bust-silver-dollar-class-i-original-bowers-borckardt-304-rarity-7-proof-65-pcgs
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"...On March 15, 1886, Dexter's attorney filed a $5,000 lawsuit against the Chapman brothers in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas. As evidence, Dexter had sent his attorney a copy of the May 1885 Chapman catalog, a flier advertising the sale, the sales invoice from J.W. Scott, and the Chapmans' letter of guarantee, along with the letters from Frossard and J. Colvin Randall that condemned the coin. Dexter's only negative evidence was the complaints of two ornery competitors of the parties from whom he had purchased the coin.
Hearing of the lawsuit, J.W. Scott wrote Dexter a letter and tried to gently drop the hint that Frossard was well known to be full of beans: "Of the 1804 dollar we purchased for you of the Chapmans, there can be no doubt of its genuineness. Soon after the sale a silly story without the slightest foundation in fact was circulated by some enemy of theirs in the hopes of doing them an injury and possibly of securing your trade. The result appears to have been simply to disgust you with collecting and putting you to great expense for nothing." Those expenses continued, as Dexter's lawyers continued to draft letters and interview numismatists. Upon being informed in January 1887 that Mint Superintendent A. Loudon Snowden and three other Mint employees would swear that his coin was authentic, Dexter asked his lawyer to drop the case. Dexter ended the suit on the proviso that he would receive "Certificates of Genuineness" from those U.S. Mint officials.
A. Loudon Snowden issued a sworn statement on February 10, 1887, that veers from fact to fiction and back to fact again. His "very full and thorough knowledge of the coins preserved by the said Mint ... what is termed the 'Mint Cabinet of Coins'" is, perhaps, debatable. His testimony that "among which is a certain silver dollar of the year 1804 coined in that year" is as false as "which silver dollar has been in the possession of the authorities of said Mint for more than forty-five years" is true. Forty-five years before 1887 was 1842, the year the 1804 dollar's existence was first published in Eckfeldt and DuBois's A Manual of Gold and Silver Coins of All Nations. Snowden went on to confirm that the Dexter coin was identical to the example in the Mint Cabinet, "the figures, characters, lettering, edging, etc. etc. on said coins" being "absolutely the same," and that "both of said coins are genuine coins, coined at the same time and from the same dies and collar." All these facts check out, indeed, the only thing Snowden fibbed about was the fact that any of these coins had been minted in 1804.
When this coin was sold in 1941, as part of the William Forrester Dunham Collection, Snowden's affidavit, an affidavit signed by Jacob B. Eckfeldt and R.A. McClure of the Philadelphia Mint, another signed by Patterson DuBois of the Philadelphia Mint, and various letters from the Chapmans, were illustrated by B. Max Mehl in the coin's auction description. Those documents transferred with the coin to its purchaser, Charles M. Williams, and were offered alongside this coin when it sold in the Harold S. Bareford Collection auction of October 1981. No mention of them was made in the 1989 auction presentation of this coin, nor were they apparently present when this coin was last offered in October 2000. Though their whereabouts are currently unknown, they are hopefully still preserved somewhere, as the various affidavits remain to this day the only official U.S. Mint statements of authenticity of any 1804 dollar..."
"To Be Esteemed Be Useful" - 1792 Birch Cent --- "I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain." - Lily Tomlin