Today I

Found Out

*Today I found out why some coins have ridges. (did anyone else just hear the “R-R-R-Ruffles have R-R-R-Ridges” commercial in their head?)

In any event, putting ridges on some coins in America got its start back in the 1700′s; simpler times when top hats and pocket watches were the height of sophistication;  James Cook was writing his name in the history books by making his way across the Arctic Circle; Marquis d’Arlandes and Pilatre de Rozier became the first humans to fly (airborn in a hot air balloon for 20 minutes); shortly thereafter André-Jacques Garnerin became the world’s first skydiver, attaching himself to a basket with a large canvas sheet and then jumping from a hot air balloon at 6500 feet.

In addition to these things, coins were actually made of materials that were worth what the coin was worth.  Namely, a half dollar silver coin contained a half dollars worth of silver.  Likewise a $10 gold coin contained $10 worth of gold.  As you might imagine from this, people started to shave off bits of these coins around the edges; so now a $10 gold piece only contained, say, $9.50 worth of gold.  Over time they’d collect these shavings and then go sell them.    And of course the payoff came from that if they were very careful when they shaved the coins, it was very difficult to tell that anything had been shaved off, so they could still generally get their $10 worth out of the now $9.50 piece.

Eventually the government decided to do something about this and one of the methods to combat this practice was to add ridges to these coins; something known as “Reeding” the coins.  With the ridges on the edges, it became much harder to shave anything off the coins without detection.  They chose not to do so with smaller valued coins that came out later, pennys and nickles, because  the metals these coins were made of weren’t valuable enough for shaving them to be worth the effort.

So that was then, why do they still do it today when the coins are no longer made of valuable metals?  Initially, supposedly, it was because it was easier and cheaper than modifying the existing machinery.  Today however, it is to help the visually impaired be able to better distinguish between coins of a somewhat similar size like a penny and a dime.   Something they unfortunately don’t do with today’s American paper money, which is indistinguishable to blind people without resorting to tricks like folding them certain ways for different bills or braille money stampers.  But as you might imagine, they still need someone to tell them what the bill is in the first place when they receive it, so they can do whatever they do to it to be able to distinguish it later.  Although, supposedly the government is working on this problem, perhaps adopting the new Canadian system of imprinting the bills with braille.

Sources:

• Why do dimes and quarters have ridged edges while pennies and nickles have flat edges?
• Why do some coins have ridges around the edges?

*Note: I moved this week and Comcast is taking their sweet time getting my internet hooked up (two weeks and counting since I made the request and they assured me it would only take a week tops); so for the next couple-o-days I’ll be pulling out some popular TIFO articles from the past that you might have missed, such as this one.  Sorry about that.  New articles will be on the way as soon as my internet gets turned on (supposedly either this Friday or Monday).