And the step-wells in Northen India. Granted, these were probably not dug by a couple of teenagers, but they go way deeper and were dug (and carved) by hand
I went there, it is incredible.
But, this is a hijack so I will refrain from the subject in this thread.
A number of items of value were lost when the Titanic sank.
I have not. Interesting story, thanks. But comparing a couple of curious, untrained teens to rotating crews of 12-15 men utilizing pickaxes, shovels, ropes, pulleys, and barrels, trucks for removing the excess dirt and an adjusted budget of over 100,000 dollars doesn’t really seem a comparable comparison.
Undoubtedly. It’d be criminal for museums to not document their holdings in this way.
And it’s a LOT easier to photograph your paintings before they’ve been stolen than afterwards.
Speaking of museums…
In 2007, the Royal Canadian Mint made 5 coins that had a face value of one million Canadian dollars, and contained 100 kg of gold. Four were sold to collectors. One of the collectors lent their coin to a museum, from which it was stolen. It has never been seen since.
Ooh, another Canadian coin mishap: In 1986 Canada was converting to using dollar coins to replace their paper one-dollar bills (good idea!) The plan was to reuse the same Voyageurs design, as on their previous silver dollars, which I always liked since it includes the northern lights.
The new dies were made in Ottawa and were packaged and shipped to the mint in Sudbury. To save money, they sent dies for both sides in the same box (dumb), plainly labeled with the mint addresses (dumber), and sent through a common letter carrier instead of armored car services (dumbest). When the dies never arrived, they had to scramble to come with a new design, which is how the loons ended up on the reverse.
…which is why the Canadian dollar is informally called the loonie.
Cool, but it raises the question (at least, for me), “why”? What possible use could anyone have for a million-dollar gold coin? I don’t think the kind of people who invest in gold like to buy huge unwieldy chunks of it, rather than easily stored gold coins or certificates. But that’s not a rhetorical question; presumably the Canadian mint thought there’d be some benefit to minting these big-ass coins; maybe just pecker-flexing?
Pretty much, yeah. The RCM has a reputation for doing weird bleeding-edge things with coins (glow-in-the-dark circulation coins, anyone?) so this was only one of them.
Melt it down,
As I recall the gold content was about $4 million US probably a bit more Canadian, but in any case much above it’s $1 million face value. Not that you could have spent it in any case. It would obviously have raised flags.
So they had negative seigniorage on these coins? Or did the collectors pay more than the face value?
A little fun with Python tells me it would be worth over $6 million USD today.
That’s practically begging for people to melt it down. Either that, or use it as the world’s most valuable pizza stone.
Which didn’t help the reputation of the Canadian Post Office, after a string strikes in the past decade or two (back when the post office was actually important for business).
Well, I’m still in the Oak Island believer camp.I have been interested in it since the same Reader’s Digest article the Laginas read in the 1960s. As the Internet grew up I periodically searched for updates. I have been glued to the “Curse of Oak Island” TV show since it started. In the past two years they have finally done testing I thought of long before that - to analyze the ground water for traces of silver and gold. Using that technology they have been able to focus the search.
If I had won that huge Powerball lottery the first thing I would do is offer to fund the “Big Dig” the Laginas have discussed a few times. This would be a vertical hole large enough to encompass the entire search area. probably 100 feet across.
As for digging to the stated depths, that has been done many times by prior searchers with very small groups of diggers. In 1965 Robert Dunfield dug a trench 100 ft wide across one area to a depth of 140 feet by minimal means. It was in raw dirt, no wooden walls. It is shown on page 35 of the link I will provide.
Here is a great report I dug up with many photos and cross sectional views of bore holes and shafts. This was presented just before the present group of searchers took over.
I bet it would make a cracking paperweight!
Melting poses numerous problems, in terms of … disposal. In fact, intact would (theoretically) be the way to go. The coin is more or less self-authenticating. Nice problem to have, sort of, depending on how you look at it. It will, on the other hand, gather quite a lot of attention at the pawn shop.
Satoshi Nakamoto.
Possibly Gerald Cotten as well.
I’m pretty sure that none of the gold coins, Maple Leafs, Krugerrands, Eagles, etc. are sold at face value. They are all bullion coins that sell for their gold content + a markup.
The opera A Guest of Honor by Scott Joplin. His first opera. The setting is Booker T. Washington being invited to dinner by TR in the White House in 1901. It was one of the few bright spots for Black Americans during the period called the Nadir of American Race Relations, even though TR was a racist.
Joplin filed a copyright application, but didn’t send a copy of the score with it. He was planning to get it published by John Stark & Son in 1903, but first he took the show on the road. Somebody stole the box office take, so Joplin couldn’t pay the boarding house, so they confiscated his stuff, including the opera manuscript. It was never retrieved.
The account of the tackle block just left hanging there also seems odd; why just leave it instead of taking it in case you need a block and tackle for something later (not to mention taking it so it’s not a big honking clue to all and sundry that there might be something interesting about this particular spot)?