We have talked about this before but there is a reason why cash coins have holes and, as if that weren't enough, there is a reason why they are square...
A major reason may be the same as why they use different metals for different denominations: to quickly to be able to tell the denominations apart from each other.
Sometimes it's just artistic flair. The art nouveau period, for instance, broke the tradition of making medals round and many medalists designed coins as well. Such "out-of-round" coin designs have generally continued to follow geometric patterns, but the expanding popularity of the vending machine has all but driven non-round circulating coinage into the past.
The hole in cash coins is for stringing the coins into batches of 100 or 1000. Mint records speak of production in terms of "strings of cash."
Cash coins were produced with a mold. Each mold had spaces for several dozen coins. When the coins come out of the mold, they were all attached to one another by small strands of metal. The coins were then broken apart and the edges sanded smooth. Rather than do this one coin at a time, hundreds of coins were placed on a square rod and the edges were smoothed using a large rasp. Since both the hole and the rod were square, the coins remained steady as they were sanded down.
Comments
Anyone else know?
Ray
or here
Odd shape, odd medal...
That's true for today, but odd shaped coins have been made for centuries & back then no one cared about the blind.
"also to help transactions to go quicker" Now this makes sense to me.
Thanks Ray, I also found those 2 threads in a search but neither really answered my question.
Glenn
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Cash coins were produced with a mold. Each mold had spaces for several dozen coins. When the coins come out of the mold, they were all attached to one another by small strands of metal. The coins were then broken apart and the edges sanded smooth. Rather than do this one coin at a time, hundreds of coins were placed on a square rod and the edges were smoothed using a large rasp. Since both the hole and the rod were square, the coins remained steady as they were sanded down.