I have since been told that biting the coin was to see if it did NOT leave a dent, A fake lead coin covered in gold leaf will dent, a gold coin will not.
If your tooth left a mark, it was fake. Most gold coins in circulation have been alloyed to be harder
Gold is harder than lead,The Mohs Scale of Hardness for Metals: Why It Is Important
so it would make more sense that if it was dented, your coin is more likely lead.
You might chip a tooth if you already had a cavity, or you might accidentally drop it on your toe. What wouldn’t go wrong is lead poisoning: Lead in its elemental form isn’t actually all that toxic, and it’s not water-soluble either. The real risk comes from lead compounds, like the lead acetate that the ancient Romans used to sweeten their wine, or the tetraethyl lead used as a gasoline additive for many years.
So back then (1980’s, I think) gold would be around $400 to $800 an ounce. He had a substantial pile of those 3.375inch square sheets (Separated by glassine paper), which he said cost $40. So, about 75 to 150 of them, 6 to 12 square feet?
You can coat a lot of lead Pieces of Eight using 12 square feet of gold leaf if you think it will fool some country bumpkins or sailors. Arrrr…
And the time has come for the picking of nits–“piece of eight” coins were silver. The proper pie-ratty-sounding gold coin is the doubloon.
Plus, another trick was to try to bend the coin while biting it. If it’s lead, you could probably do this. Even gold, however, would be a bit more difficult to bend.
Lead was a favourite because gold is notoriously heavy, and only lead was a common enough cheap metal whose weight might fool the unwary in the Good Old Days.
Arrr… Shiver me timbers… It did seem mighty hard to bite into eight pieces…
Thanks
that was my source,…I forgot where I heard it, and I was disappointed I couldn’t easily come up with a source on my own.
Doesn’t anyone remember that Underdog (as the humble bootblack) always bit the coins he was given?
… and each of eight pieces was called… a BIT!
Remember “two bits four bits six bits a dollar!”?
So, the original bit coin was only worth 12 1/2 cents.
Well, yeah, but he was a dog. They do that with almost anything you give them.
So this is how bitcoin was invented?
Of course, for anyone who’s actually familiar with gold, lead would never fool them, since, dense though lead is, gold is nearly twice as dense.
Now, tungsten, that’ll work.
Only if you bit hard enough…?
As I understood it, the “pieces” of the eight referred to cutting the coin into 8 pie shapes to make change, in the days when (a) coins were valued for the metal they contained and (b) change was hard to come by. It was a common practice to cut coins to get a smaller amount of value; the design of the “pieces of eight” was that it lent itself to easily ensuring the pieces were equally fairly cut.
I think…
That’s the story I have heard, but I have my doubts about the accurate cutting. There’ be a good business in cutting a coin to get eight piece and still have a little gold left over. The ridges on quarters and other coins were used to stop the practice of shaving where a little bit of metal was scraped from the circumference of the coin.
Pieces of Eightwere so called because they were worth 8 reales.
There were no score marks for easy cutting, nor lines to indicate where to cut. They were no easier to divide fairly than any other coin.
I don’t believe biting a coin would have been much of a diagnostic.
Shopkeepers had special scales designed for the purpose to detect counterfeits, because a coin of the proper size, and weight, couldn’t (practically) be anything but gold. Modern counterfeiting revolves around faking rare or valuable collector coins. They are made of gold in the proper alloy, because their value is in the collector realm where the price is far in excess of their bullion content. The scales won’t help here. A modern counterfeit detector for gold and silver bullion coins is called the Fisch, though I’ve never seen a coin dealer use one. They must see a lot of coins, and never look twice at a government issued bullion coin. But it’s probably worth being aware of, there are fakes out there.
In the U.S. they never cut silver 8 real pieces into smaller pieces for small change.
That’s surprising, as I recall reading that in the 19th century the US had a severe shortage of small coinage at times, and small coinage had a lot more purchasing power. Postage stamps were used at one time, things like that.
Sam one thing I wondered about, whenever gold doubloons or silver pieces of eight are portrayed in movies or radio, they always make a plastic clack or metal slug sound as they are dropped on a table. As anyone who has handled old coins know, silver dollars and gold alloy coins make a beautiful ringing noise, that is very distinctive. Do Spanish doubloons ring when dropped on a hard surface? I suspect that it’s the alloy that does this, but I’m not sure. For example, Canada makes a very pure 99.999% gold bullion coin, I imagine it makes a very unsatisfying clunk.
Depends on the period of time the coin was made. Prior to 1732, most 8 real silver and 8 escudo gold coins were rather crudely shaped(called cobs). The blanks were cut from cast bars before striking and were rather irregularly thick and thin. They clunked.
After 1732 the blanks were more round. They still didn’t ring quite as nicely as early 19th century coins. Your speculation about the alloy is probably true.