In Australia, we don’t have coppers any more, but we now have “gold coins”, the $1 and $2.
Yes, and stupidly, the $1 coin is larger than the $2. Previously, all our coins increased in size with their increase in value (apart from the copper coins when we used LsD - can’t work out how to type a pound symbol on this keyboard.)
When I was in the UK in 1983, their 10p coin was larger than the 20p coin (I’ve been told that that’s no longer the case), which I found difficult to get my head around. I was constantly tendering the wrong money.
At one time in Thailand, we had three different sizes of one-baht coins and two or three different sizes of five-baht coins all in circulation at once.
The 2 cent coin was (just slightly) larger than the 5 cent coin as well.
It’s still the case, although the 10p is smaller than it used to be (but still bigger than the 20p).
It’s still the case, but coins can be grouped into pairs where the larger ones are the more valuable ones (1p and 2p coins are round and copper with smooth edges, 5p and 10p coins are round and silver with milled edges, 20p and 50p coins are rounded, smooth silver heptagons and £1 and £2 coins are fatter, round and milled).
That’s because the eight-real coin - the “piece of eight” - was the US dollar until Congress established the US Mint in 1795. Thanks to the Spanish mints in Mexico and Peru, it was the most common coin circulating in the Americas. Furthermore, it was a standard weight, unlike the pound, which Thomas Jefferson noted varied from 1547 grains of fine silver in Georgia to 966.75 in New York and North Carolina. We even took the name from the Spanish coin. The Spanish adopted the name of a Dutch coin of equivalent value, the philippusdaalder, and applied it to the silver eight real as the dolaro.
I don’t know when it went out of circulation, but the British also had a fourpenny coin called a groat.
pssst … see post 71
Yeah, I know - saw your post after I wrote mine.:smack:
Still, you should be pleased that I didn’t forget the groat.
The British crown coin (5/- or25p as a modern commemorative) and the old silver dollar (from the 1790s until the end of the Eisenhower dollar) were of closely similar size. The denomination, and the name dollar ultimately derive from large sil;ver coins whose content was mined in St. Joachim;s Valley (Sanktjoachimsthal), Bohemia, and as a result called joachimsthalers, or thalers for short.
As others have said, it still is (although not so much as it was). Worse, the 2p coin is bigger than both the 10p or 20p
What’s really silly is that the only coins out of the original decimal set that haven’t been reduced in size are the 1p and 2p. The 2p is now the third largest coin, after the £2 and 50p.
I guess part of the reason is:
[ul]
[li]You can’t make the penny a whole lot smaller than it is[/li][li]The 2p needs to weigh the same as two pennies, so they can be mixed for banking[/li][/ul]
Yes, I did actually look at some of the government documents about decimalisation when they declassified them a while back.
IIRC they wanted the coins to have a weight/value relationship within the same metal (i.e. all “copper” coins could be valued by weight and all “silver” coins could be too, but not a mixture). As they had a decimal halfpenny back then, the 2p coin had to be four times the weight of the ½p, so if they hadn’t made the 2p fairly huge (albeit still smaller than the ridiculous pre-decimal penny) the ½p would have been tiny. Since the ½p coin was demonetised nearly 30 years ago, they could have made the 1p nearer in size to the old ½p by now and thus reduced the 2p at the same time, but by now it would make far more sense to get rid of them altogether and have 5p as the smallest coin.
Similarly, the 5p and 10p coins were kept at the same size and weight as the shilling and florin, which meant that if they had brought in a 20p at the same weight ratio, as originally planned (while introducing a note for the 50p to replace the 10 shilling note) it would have had to weigh nearly an ounce!
Instead, they brought in a heptagonal 50p and gave up on the weight ratios (and later brought in a smaller, also heptagonal, 20p).
Only tangentially related but still kind of interesting:
UK Government debt certificates used to be issued with gilded edges, and even though they no longer are, they are still referred to as “gilts.”
The US Dollar/British Pound exchange rate is referred to as the “cable.” The name is derived from the transatlantic cable that was first used to transmit prices between New York and London in the 1860’s.
I totally agree with that. In “shopping basket” terms, both the 1p and 2p piece are worth less than the farthing or the 1/2p when they were discontinued.
Do you know why this is? After all, a 5.4g 20p coin, rather than the 5g coin that was issued would have meant that it would be able to be weighed in with the (then) 13.5g 50p.
I’d always assumed there was a correlation between them.
I’m not sure. You’re right that it would have made sense. The 50p was introduced in 1969 and the 20p not until 1982, so you’d think they could have made the 20p a little heavier.
Having said that, all the bank coin bags I’ve seen say “No mixed coin”, so maybe once they had the 50p messing up the cupronickel coin weight ratios they just gave up, on the basis that you couldn’t value mixed cupronickel coins by weight any more anyway.