We get a few foreign coins at work,and I’ve noticed that many of them are the same size as U.S. coins. The Canadian and Bahamian pennies are the same size as the U.S. coin. The French one Franc coin,Canadian quarter,1 Deutschmark and some Arab coin are the same size as the American quarter. Is there a rational explanation, or is this the work of the Illuminati?
Actually, Canadian and American coins aren’t quite the same size. If you put a Canadian and an American quarter-dollar side by side, for instance, you will notice the Canadian one is about a half-millimeter smaller in diameter. The Canadian half-dollar is substantially smaller than its American counterpart. The Canadian cent coin is 12-sided (as of 1982) and thinner, but has the same diameter. The dollar coin is roughly the same size, but again the Canadian coin is 11-sided. The 5- and 10-cent coins are basically identical in size.
But why are they so close? It’s simple, really; they all got their start from copying the Spanish (Latin American) currency, the infamous ‘piece of eight’ (hence eight ‘bits’ to the dollar). The U.S. and Canadian quarters are roughly the size of the old Spanish 2-real coin. And when Canada started minting its own coins in the late 19th century, after it got its independence, it adopted the U.S. coin sizes for convenience, excepting the cent and 5-cent (which were changed in 1920). No secret societies needed to explain it.
The interesting question is, how do the vending machine makers keep people from ripping them off by using Canadian coins in U.S. vending machines? The answer to that one is easy: Canadian coins are nickel and attracted to a magnet. American coins are a copper-nickel sandwich and are not attracted to a magnet.
Most countries in the British Commonwealth have coins of the same size, shape and colour. They also have the same picture of Queen Elizabeth II on the obverse side. New Zealand coins work in most Australian vending machines, and frequently turn up in the change in my pockets. In fact, they are almost interchangeable to the extent that when somebody quiet rightfully refuses one as payment, people feel they are being pedantic.
The exact date of Canadian independence is somewhat disputed. 1867 was the date of Confederation, but that did not make Canada independent. As a question of constitutional convention, Canada’s independence was recognized at the 1926 Imperial Conference. The Statute of Westminster implemented that constitutional convention in statute law as of 1931. The Canada Act 1982 eliminated the last legal link between the British Parliament and Canada, at Canada’s request, as required by the Statute of Westminster.
I wouldn’t agree with this description. When I’ve come back to Canada from Australia or the U.K., one of the first things I notice is how small our coins are compared to the OZ and Brit coins. (Can’t remember if that was the case when I came back from India.) As well, the image of the Queen on Canadian coins minted in the last decade was done by a Canadian artist.
If vending machines can tell the differnce, why can’t the banks? I have seen all sorts of unusual coins in a bank wrapped roll of quarters. Of course, if the banks send them out to customers, they don’t have to lose money on the exchange rate.
Some Canadian coins (especially, oddly enough, nickels) are, in fact, made of nearly pure nickel, but it depends on the year they were minted. I think that the current batch is nonmagnetic, for instance.
A friend of mine just got back from Australia, and showed me
several Aussie dollars’ worth of coins she had brought back.
I noticed that the one-dollar coin, apparently made of brass, is about the size of a U.S. dollar, or slightly bigger than a quarter. The $2 coin, also of brass, is much smaller in diameter than the $1 coin, but seems to be a lot thicker. I noticed, too, that there were huge 50-cent pieces. It seemed that these were way too large for what must be relataively low-value coins, about like American quarters.
All this seems rather confusing. Is Australia going through a period of coinage reform, with older versions gradually being phased out?
“The Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galacticbanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change.”
– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Chronos–Canadian nickels were pure nickel through 1981, then switched to copper-nickel(75%/25%). And I think the composition was changed again in the last five years to steel coated by nickel to save money. The changes are always about saving money.
That’s really ironic, changing the composition of money in order to save money.
If they’re so in need of money, just take some of that metal you’ve set aside for nickels and make dimes. Freakin’ dime, smallest of all coins, screwed up the whole obvious concept of something being worth more if it was bigger.
Then they could take the profit from making dimes instead of nickels, and buy more metal to make the nickels.
There would be a lot more dimes, which would be a pain in the ass for all of us, but the government could stay in business.
Not specially. Ever heard of inflation? If the composition of coins isn’t periodically changed, it gradually becomes more expensive to make them. When it costs more to make the coin than its face value, you change the way you make it, or else you lose money on the coins.
Thank you for providing a case in point. The nickel has been (roughly) the same size and composition since its introduction in 1866. The reason it got the name nickel (originally, ‘five-cent nickel’, to distinguish it from the three-cent nickel coin) was because that was what it was made from, while cents were made of copper and everything else was in silver or gold. This is why the dime is so small; it was made out of silver right up to 1964. (Ever wonder why you never see dimes or quarters dated before 1965?) When they changed over to a copper-nickel sandwich in 1965, they deliberately kept the same size so that vending machine makers wouldn’t have to re-fit all their machines.
So what did they use for a five-cent piece before 1866 (before 1920 in Canada)? A silver half-dime, which was even smaller than the dime! In fact, back when we made coins out of metal that was actually worth something (what a concept eh?), the coins that were worth more were larger, because they were worth roughly the amount of precious metal in them. The exceptions came when you switched metals, so for instance the silver half-dime was smaller than the copper cent, and the gold quarter-eagle ($2.50) was quite a bit smaller than the silver dollar.
You do have a point, though; there are lots of people, especially business people, who would like to see the cent eliminated; it’s really more hassle than it’s worth. Personally, I’d like to see it taken one step further; eliminate the cent, nickel and quarter, put in a twenty-cent piece, and round everything to the nearest dime.