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Run your fingers along the edge of a dime and you’ll notice the coin has a crimped edge. If you were to count those tiny grooves and valleys, you’d find 118 ridges, one less than is found on a quarter. But not all American coins have ridges, and here’s why. Rippled edges on larger-denomination coins have been a part of American currency since the U.S. Mint’s early days, and they were a clever solution to a massive currency conundrum: counterfeiting and fraud. Around the 1700s, coins were an easy target for money-generating schemes, including coin clipping: People would clip or shave off slim portions of a coin’s outer edge, cashing in the scraps of precious silver and gold. In Great Britain, coin clipping was so common that the crown deemed it a form of treason. In early North American settlements, “coining” — the actual production of fake coins — was equally problematic.
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It's a fibPennies first began circulating in March 1793, though many Americans were disgruntled with their initial design. The supersized coins were larger than today’s quarters, and some believed the Lady Liberty depicted looked inelegant. The coins were soon discontinued.
Knowing this, American coin makers added grooved bands — called reeded edges — to the thin sides of dimes, quarters, and larger coins then made from silver, in order to prevent shaving and make fraud more difficult. (Pennies and nickels remained smooth-sided since they were pressed from less-valuable copper and nickel.) But reeded edges lost some of their utility when the Coinage Act of 1965 changed the composition of dimes and quarters from silver to a copper-nickel blend. Reeded edges remain today as a design choice, and because they help people with visual impairments differentiate among coins.
Numbers Don't Lie
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Collecting and studying coins and other forms of money is called ______.
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Collecting and studying coins and other forms of money is called numismatics.
Coins were once commonly carved into “love tokens.”
Not all coins were saved or spent — in centuries past, some became tiny testaments to love. Love tokens, an idea that likely originated in Great Britain around the 13th century, were crafted by sanding away the faces of coins and using the precious metal as a blank canvas, which was then often engraved with memorable dates, a loved one’s initials, or romantic sentiments. After spreading to North America, love tokens reached peak popularity in the late 1800s, in part because they were used to memorialize family members lost during the Civil War. While they were initially etched by hand, professional carvers were sought out for more intricate designs, and the trend became so popular that crafters even set up booths at the 1893 world’s fair in Chicago. Many surviving love tokens are difficult to appraise or date because of their lack of detail and highly personal meaning, yet their greatest value may be the reminder that love can withstand the test of time.
Nicole Garner Meeker is a writer and editor based in St. Louis. Her history, nature, and food stories have also appeared at Mental Floss and Better Report.
