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- From mhodder@theworld.com Wed May 15 12:34:52 2002
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Date: Wed, 15 May 2002 19:34:40 -0000
To: colonial-coins@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: Misquote-6% Lead
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From: "mike468hodder" <mhodder@theworld.com>
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Forget the lead, that's not what makes casts go thunk instead of
ring. I'm more interested in the general composition reported to
have been "gun metal". To me, that says the coiners used whatever
was to hand to make a copper looking coin.
By the way, there have been a number of articles on or
incorporating the subject of metallurgical analysis of coins done
here in the backward colonies on copper, silver, and gold coins.
I've done a few, myself. Check out CNL, AJN(ii), the pattern coin
guys, etc.
Fingerprinting ore sources has always been found to be something
of a chimera, I'm afraid, save in the cases of coins struck on
site and/or by miners and there the Brits have it over us, since
they deal in some cases with virgin flans made by the mine owners
whose advertisements the tokens bear. Here in the colonies, we
used whatever copper, brass, tin, cannons, pots and pans
(Machins) were to hand. The copper mines in Belleville, NJ may
have supplied some ore to Rahway but that mine flooded in 1776
so any output was necessarily small. Ogden bought copper from an
importer who got it from the UK in sheets, presumably it was
cheaper and of better quality than local stuff. Whoever made the
New Haven Fugios later on used whatever was around for the pieces
variously called copper, red copper, yellow copper, red brass,
brass, etc. My point is that the British experience was different
from ours and is amenable to some fingerprinting of ore sources.
Where one has to deal with admixtures, as we do, here,
fingerprinting is not possible. A similar situation exists in the
field of gold and mixed metal bars made in the western states in
the 1800's, where mixing was ordinary and tracing impossible.
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