Why coins have ridges

They started using substitutes copper, zinc. You probably seen people do this to gold coins in old movies. I think my conclusion is right, please prove me wrong. What do you think? Thanks Lacey. You can get a braille keyboard you know, instead of just mashing the keyboard. The value of money only changed with the value of gold. Bite on a piece of gold and it will break your tooth. Gold nuggets when you take them out of the river are as hard as the rocks surrounding them.

Gold is a soft metal and wears away with the sanding action of river gravel etc. The reason for the bite on gold is because after the ridges were put on gold coins theives started using German made drills very small to drill holes into the body of double eagles and repack with lead.

This left the center of the coins soft and by bite you could detect the void or softness of impacted lead indicating a bad coin. Take double eagles and you can easily drill out two ounces of gold without detection. Do you not realize that gold and silver are expensive and that new coins have to be made everyday?? Much easier and smarter to mass produce coins that are made of materials that are cheaper than the coin itself.

Every coin we have is a distinct size, shape and density for this purpose. Well, I always thought thats why coins historically became grooved at edges in the Old World. I never really paid attention to the ridges around the coins. Clippers would shave off a tiny amount of metal all the way around the rims of a bunch of coins, collect the shavings, then sell them. Working carefully, a coin clipper could trim enough off of coins to make a nice profit, but not so much as to make them noticeably lighter or smaller.

A clipper could then still go out and spend his devalued coins as if they were unaltered. Reeded edges ruined this scheme, since a shaved edge would be immediately obvious and alert anyone who received one that something was wrong.

Why don't nickels and pennies have reeded edges? Nickels and pennies are mainly composed of inexpensive metals, so the chances that they would be tampered with are low. Before their adoption by the U. Mint, reeded edges were also used in the UK. When the physicist Isaac Newton became warden of the Royal Mint in , he used reeded edges, among other means, to combat clippers and counterfeiters.

Other European coins from as far back as the early s also feature reeded edges. Coin clipping is no longer a problem, but reeded edges are still around, a centuries-old security measure hanging on in an age where people pay for things with their smart phones instead of digging out pocket change. The tenacity is admirable. As such, forgers had a field day.

Since English coins varied so widely in size and quality, it was easy to pass off even the most sloppy knockoffs as legal tender.

Riots broke out as faith in the English currency plummeted. By adding an identifiable feature to the edges, clippers could no longer remove part the coins subtly.

Anyone receiving the clipped coin would, nearly instantly, know that it was manipulated. So, why do the penny and nickel not have this security feature? While quarters and dimes were, at times, made from silver, the smaller-denomination coins have generally had a melt value too small to warrant tinkering with their edges.

Bonus fact : In the late s, coin clipping was used as the pretext for a rarely told incident of government-driven anti-Semitism.