Category Archives: Numismatics

Coins from Way Down South

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Hard to believe Canada Day’s rolled around again. Time to honor our neighbors up north by watching one of their major cultural achievements. Other episodes are also available on YouTube.

Lilly brought us souvenirs from her trip to Latin America — omiyagi, to use the Japanese term, which means souvenirs specially obtained for people who didn’t make the trip. It’s a custom we follow.

She got me three things, all showing that she knows her dad pretty well: coins, postcards and Ecuadorean chocolate. As it happens, both Ecuador and Panama are dollarized economies. No currency exchange was necessary; she took greenback cash and also withdrew funds, in dollars, from an ATM.

The small change is each country’s own. This is 50 centavos from Ecuador, obverse.

50 centavos, EcuadorIt features the face of one José Eloy Alfaro Delgado (1842-1912), who was president of Ecuador from 1895 to 1901 and from 1906 to 1911, and had the distinction of being assassinated by anti-secularizers, since he introduced the likes of civil marriage and divorce, and secular eduction, to his nation. He also oversaw the construction of the Ferrocarril Transandino (Trans-Andean Railroad) connecting Guayaquil and Quito.

The reserve.

50 centavos, EcuadorThe steel Ecuadorean coins are made at mints in Canada and Mexico. Other denominations include 25c, 10c, 5c, and (supposedly) 1c. Lilly brought back the first three of that list, and along with the 50c piece, I checked their sizes. They’re exactly the same size as their respective U.S. coins.

Apparently Ecuador doesn’t issue dollar coins. Lilly said that U.S. dollar coins are in circulation there much more than they are in the United States. If we’d known that, I’d have given her a roll or two of dollar coins to take with her.

Panama, on the other hand, does have its own dollar-equivalent coin, the bimetallic balboa, which Lilly tells me circulates with U.S. dollar coins.

one balboaWho else to put on the balboa than Balboa? The man who lost his head over Panama. Here’s something I didn’t know: there’s a crater on the Moon named for him. He might have made it to the Pacific, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t get that far.

The reverse.

balboaIt’s hard to see, but the coat of arms of Panama includes a depiction of the isthmus, a sword, rifle, shovel, hoe, and more. The eagle is specifically — according to recent Panamanian law — a harpy eagle (Harpia harpyja), the national bird. The impossible-to-read motto is Pro Mundi Beneficio, for the benefit of the world.

Thursday Squibs

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Sometimes at the bank I get a roll of dollar coins, which totals 25 all together. These days, most of them are presidential dollars, though some Sacagaweas and Susies are usually mixed in. Since the presidents after Garfield have relatively low mintage — Garfield had a total of 74.2 million from both mints, while Arthur had only about 10 million — it’s rare to see one of the later presidents. This week, a TR coin turned up (one of 9.2 million minted) in a roll. In worn condition. Odd.

“What’s syncopation?” Lilly asked recently. Being in band, I thought she’d know that. Maybe not. I learned about it in high school, but when she asked I realized I’d forgotten how to describe it. Just what YouTube is for: this is a lucid explanation, and he even makes Philip Glass a little more interesting.

In line at a grocery store the other day, a man behind me was carrying on a vigorous conversation on his phone. Nothing unusual about that anymore, unlike the day in 1989 when I saw a woman pull a brick of a phone from her purse at the McDonald’s that used to be on the Mag Mile and start talking into it. Overhearing one side of a call these days might even be annoying, depending on the conversation.

I couldn’t pin down his language. It didn’t quite sound like Russian, but it was some kind of Slavic tongue. Maybe Ukrainian. Anyway, he had a good voice, so I listened. There wasn’t much else to do in line anyway. Then I started to notice: talktalktalktalk OK talktalktalk OK talktalktalktalktalktalktalk OK talktalktalktalktalktalk OK.

I know OK is practically universal. (Or do the French resist?) That wasn’t a surprise. Still, I marveled that a bit of 1830s American slang, whose origin even now isn’t quite certain, has traveled so far. So naturally did he use the word, it might as well have been native from his point of view.

New fact for the day (a couple of weeks ago for me, when I learned it): Neil Diamond wrote “Red, Red Wine.” A strange notion at first, but then again he’s written other songs with an alcohol motif. Then I learned that that’s his actual birth name: Neil Diamond, son of Akeeba and Rose Diamond of Brooklyn. It always sounded like a stage name to me.

In Branson in 2012 I met a fellow whose act was a Neil Diamond impersonation (tribute, as they say). He had the enormous mane and the good looks of young Neil Diamond, but I didn’t get to hear whether he had similarly impressive pipes. I’d hope so.

The last episode of Mad Men is on Sunday. A lot of shows now have last episodes, so it isn’t quite like the novelty of watching the end of The Fugitive (which I don’t remember) or even, come to think of it, The Mary Tyler Moore Show (which I do). Here’s an interesting essay about final shows, though maybe covering something that doesn’t really deserve an essay, namely the last episode of Hogan’s Heroes.

Still, I’ll be watching Mad Men. If only to see whether Roger Sterling gets one more funny line or scene.

FEC from the PRC

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One more scrap of former currency (for now). And by scrap, I mean that almost literally, since this Foreign Exchange Certificate from the People’s Republic of China measures 5.25 x 2 inches. It’s more like script than a note.

FECI’ve posted about this currency before, so no need to re-write about it, only re-post: “I only changed money once outside of the Bank of China, when Yuriko and I were sitting on a bench and she reminded me of the FECs that I had — not much, only about ¥110. I took them out of my wallet to look at them, and a man next to me on the bench, who had previously expressed no interest in us, suddenly offered a 1-to-1 exchange for RMB. I accepted the deal. I don’t know what profit he got from it, since FECs were being phased out, but he must have gotten something.

50 fenFor some reason, probably my partiality to odd souvenirs, I kept this one. Maybe it wasn’t worth bothering with, since this particular note is 50 fen — or half a yuan, the base currency (it was about 8.7 yuan to the dollar then, so 50 fen was 6 cents or so). Ten fen is called a jiao, but I’m not sure how close an equivalent of a dime that is. That is, everyone understands that a dime is 10 cents, but it’s fairly rare to count in dimes. I don’t know whether the Chinese usually count in fen or some combination of fen and jiao.

More from before: “RMB, or Renminbi (人民币), ‘People’s Money,’ is Chinese currency, of which the yuan is the main denomination. From 1979 to early 1994, just before we visited, foreigners in China were supposed to use FECs instead of RMB, which the government sold to foreigners at a premium to RMB. But as usual with this kind of thing, I understand that rule wasn’t rigidly enforced, especially by the early 1990s. We didn’t have to worry about it in any case, and thinking back on it now, I’m not sure how I got the FECs.”

Sir Issac & His Toblerone

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I might be misremembering, but when I saw an episode of Yes, Minister on a Virgin Air flight out of Stansted in ’94, I think that one of the characters handed another a pound note for some reason. That got a chuckle from someone British seated nearby, who observed that the one-pound note was long gone. As it would have been by then, by about 10 years, replaced by a pound coin in 1984 (the US dollar note, while an icon, is also increasingly an outlier).
pound noteI must have acquired this note in the UK in 1983. It’s crisp and unused. This particular one was part of Series D, first issued in 1978 and finally withdrawn in 1988. I understand, however, that if I take it to the Bank of England, I’ll receive a pound coin in exchange.

Sir Isaac Newton graces the back. According to one source — a book called Religion, Science, and Worldview: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Westfall (2002) — the portrait was based on two paintings by Sir Godfrey Kneller, and on the table beside Newton is a telescope and a triangluar prism (taken by jokers to be a Toblerone bar).

pound noteHe’s holding a copy of the first edition of the Principia, open to the pages that contain a diagram of a Keplerian ellipse. I know that Newton built on Kepler’s work to compute the acceleration of bodies, but what the diagram describes exactly is beyond me. So is the knowledge required to assess this line in Religion, Science, and Worldview: “The large diagram that occupies the left half of the note is also from Proposition XI, but evidently from the Cajori edition of the Motte translation of the Pemberton third Latin edition.”

The book further asserts that the original issue in 1978 had a mistake in one of the diagram’s lines, corrected in 1981. That means I have a note made after 1981. There’s more discussion about the Sun in the diagram not being at one of the foci of the ellipse, but mistakenly at the center. Even a fan of currency minutiae like me can’t be bothered to care.

Złotych No Mo’

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The awakening spring at Poplar Creek Forest Preserve on Sunday.

Poplar Creek, April 2015Poland had one of the smallest currencies of any country I’ve been to, since we got there a few months ahead of the redenomination of 1995. Soon notes like this Communist-era 1,000 złotych would be obsolete.
1000złotychThey were already small change. If I remember right, the exchange rate was about 20,000 złotych to the US dollar, making this note worth about a nickel. No coins were in circulation in late 1994 in Poland, only notes; and somewhere in my envelope of worthless foreign money, I have a 50-złotych note: all of 0.25 cents at the time.

I was glad to see Copernicus on the note, even if he’s a little horse-faced in the portrait, which is clearly based on this painting, dated 1580, some decades after his death. Maybe he looked like that.

1000złotych-2Fittingly, a Copernican solar system on the other side. As I said, the note has long been superseded by new currency at 10,000 to 1. No euros for Poland yet, though. Understandably, they’re a mite skittish about the common currency just now.

An Old Ringgit

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Warmth + Rain =
clover April 2015At least here in temperate North America. Flowers are emerging, too, as well as bush buds. The trees are still more cautious about the whole notion of spring, but they’re coming around.

Tucked away in my envelope of nearly worthless — sometimes flat-out worthless — paper money is a RM1 I picked up either in 1992 or ’94. The formal name is a ringgit, though informally it’s a Malaysian dollar.

M$1By the early 1990s, the note was on its way out, replaced by a dollar coin, an example of which I don’t have. These days, RM1 is worth about US 28 cents; I remember it trading for about 40 cents. I’d do pricing in my head in dollars, even though my pay was in yen, and 40 cents to the ringgit made it easy: half minus 10 percent (Singapore dollars were half plus 10 percent in those days).

The portrait on the note is Tuanku Abdul Rahman ibni Almarhum Tuanku Muhammad (died 1960), the first Yang di-Pertuan Agong of Malaya. That is, the supreme head of state, elected by the country’s other sultans, in office before the country was reorganized as Malaysia. I don’t think there’s any monarchical position anywhere else quite like it.
M$1-2That’s the National Monument in Kuala Lumpur, which memorializes the Malaysian dead of the Japanese occupation and the Malayan Emergency.

Thursday Stew

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A bit of meltage today, with temps around freezing, and the sunshine doing the melting where it hit snow directly. Compared with last week, the air felt good. But hard winter will be back, count on it.

Started working my way through Deadwood around New Year’s. When the show was still fairly new, the profanity put me off it. Not the profanity itself, but the fact that I considered it grossly anachronistic. Now I understand it as an intentional anachronism, done for good reasons. The show’s impressive: one that helps make the argument that now is a golden age of television, or at least the 2000s were.

Ann’s been reading Through the Looking-Glass lately, and looking for our copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which has gone missing. Not long ago she read The Wizard of Oz. And she’s asked me to find our copies of The Hobbit and the first Harry Potter book, so she can read them. The kid’s got some kind of bug.

I have an ambition to scan more coins, specifically those I’ve encountered lately that don’t feature any Roman letters or even Arabic numerals. In the old days, it was a chore figuring out the origin of coins like that, so much so that for some time as a youngster I had a 1 yen coin that I thought was a 1 yuan coin. These days, all it usually takes is a focused Google search.

But I’ve alternately been too busy and too indolent to do much coin-scanning. I did get around to this one. Forgot to check the box that would correct for dust (the scanner’s got some impressive features for a cheaper model; guess the tech’s improving).

Ethiopian 10 SantimIt’s a well-worn brass 10 santim piece from Ethiopia. 100 santim = 1 birr. The lion, I suppose, is the Lion of Judah.

Two Demonitized European Coins

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Here’s another interesting disk from my bag o’ cheapies: 200 Italian lira. Pre-euro, of course, and in this case 1993, and a special commemorative. Or not so special, considering that 170 million of them were made, and that they’re a aluminum-bronze combination. I’ve seen the obverse bust simply referred to as an “allegory,” so presumably that’s Italia personified.

L200ObvThe one to have would be the proof version, of which only 6,500 were made. In any case, the coin commemorates the 70th anniversary of the Italian Air Force (since 1946, the Aeronautica Militare Italiana, but before that the Regia Aeronautica Italiana), or maybe just military aviation in that country.

L200RevAll kinds of interesting detail. But when I think of Italian military aviation, I think of Italo Balbo, who didn’t found the independent Italian Air Force, but built it up as an instrument of fascist power. Even so, he has a street named after him in downtown Chicago to this day.

Next, another sort of flying: the common swallow, or hirundo rustica. Who would put a swallow on their coins?

Slov2The newly independent Slovenia, that’s who. This is a 2 tolarja piece, and during the pre-euro period that country was fond of animals on its small coins. I see a fish, a fly, an owl, and others, all helpfully with their scientific names.

Slov1During its first year of issue,1992, the 2-tolarja piece was a brass coin with a non-proof mintage of over 5 million. The tolar used to be the country’s base unit, with tolarja as a plural. Clearly a cognate with dollar, a word that gets around.

Stray Dominican Coins

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My latest acquisition of cheap foreign coins included some Dominican pieces, such as a nickel-clad steel 25 centavo coin, featuring an ox-drawn cart. A little investigation reveals that 25 Dominican centavos isn’t much money at all — the equivalent of a little more than half a U.S. cent. Even in the Dominican Republic, I can’t believe that buys very much.

DomRep2RevSo they probably don’t circulate much any more.  Presumably 25 centavos had a more purchasing power in 1991, though sometimes coins linger well beyond their strict usefulness (e.g., the U.S. cent). Some 38 million of them were minted in 1991. On the reverse — I think it’s the reverse — is the Escudo de armas de la República Dominicana, which, in case it’s hard to read, proclaims Dios, Patria, Libertad.

DomRep2ObvAlso in the lot: a Dominican peso. The portrait is of Juan Pablo Duarte y Diez (1813-1876), one of the founding fathers of the Dominican Republic. DomRepObvIt’s brass, and apparently about 80 million of them were minted in 2002, so it’s a very common coin.

DomRepRevAgain with the escudo. A quick look at images of Dominican coins shows it to be a common feature, maybe even one mandated by law.

TR & Saint-Gaudens

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Remarkable summer-like weekend just passed, but unlike the previous weekends, we didn’t go anywhere. Spent a fair amount of time on the deck reading. Seemingly overnight, some neighborhood trees have turned yellow.

The other day I picked up Striking Change: The Great Artistic Collaboration of Theodore Roosevelt and Augustus Saint-Gaudens by Michael F. Moran (2007) at Half-Priced Books. Looks good. Presidential history and numismatics: a winning combo for sure. I hope to get around to it soon, but then again I have Illegal Tender: Gold, Greed, and the Mystery of the Lost 1933 Double Eagle, by David Tripp, and I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.

Anyway, TR thought US coinage of the time was uninspired at best, particularly the gold coins, and set about to change them. A lesser-known effort than busting trusts or digging the Panama Canal, but one certainly worthy of TR’s attention. So was born the well-admired Augustus Saint-Gaudens coins.

But there seems to be more to the book than that story. Q. David Bowers writes in Coinbooks.com: “The text is particularly valuable in showcasing the sculptor’s activities with important numismatic projects beyond the famous 1907 coinage. While the story of the coins has been told in depth in several places, including in Renaissance of American Coinage 1906–1908 (Burdette, 2007) and United States Gold Coins: An Illustrated History (Bowers,1982), treatment of the important medals has ranged from scarcely anything to light sketches. Striking Change ends that.

“Further, the author gives a comprehensive look at the design competition for new United States coins in 1891. This involved quite a bit of effort at the time, but ultimately ended as a non-event, as outside artists consulted in the competition did not seem to have created motifs that anyone liked—and Chief Engraver Charles E. Barber of the United States Mint ended up creating new motifs for the dime, quarter, and half dollar.”