Counting coins by machine

Press, 25 May 1977, Page 12

Counting coins by machine

Although inflation over the years has reduced the coin to a minor role in our daily lives there is an ever increasing number in circulation and some types of business could not survive without the cupro nickel token.

Croesus, the last and legendary kind of Lydia in the sixth century B.C. did not invent the coin but be certainly had a lot to do with the development of our modern system. Croesus was literally sitting on a gold mine with rich deposits of alluvial gold at his back door and so the raw material was no real problem and authoritative sources credit him with being the first to adopt a bi-metal system — that is -— coins of pure gold and others of lesser value of pure silver. This proved an advantage to the earlier system of striking coins from a mixture of equal parts of both called electrum or “white gold.”

The coins of the Lydians were bean shaped lumps of metal roughly

stamped in relief of varying value dependant on weight, but the idea caught on quickly in Asia Minor and surviving specimens would suggest that by the fourth century B.C. coins were almost works of art. The evolution of the coin progressed, round, square, hexagonal, some with holes in and some/ as in the case of Spanish American issues ingots of gold with the value stamped into them.

New Zealand in its brief history has already produced its share of collectors’ items, best known perhaps is the 1935 three pence, currently catalogued at $45 or up to $2OO for an uncirculated specimen and a pocketful of florins can still yield the occasional silver florin, most of which are catalogued at not less than a $1.50 for circulated coins and up to $6O for the 1936 issue.

In recent years the 1967 two cent piece yielded an unknown quantity of incorrectly minted coins muled on the obverse with “Bahamas five cent.” Most were hastily withdrawn but those that escaped from the Reserve Bank will now fetch from $l2 to $2O. The most valuable commemorative coin listed is the 1935 Waitangi Crown and if you can find one amongst grandma’s treasures it could be worth $750 or more.

The high cost of labour and the diminishing value of coins has made mechanised forms of handling them increasingly popular with commercial and municipal authorities. The seven million five cent pieces that fed the in-

satiable appetite of the Christchurch parking meters were processed through a machine that counts at two thousand coins a minute and extracts the odd washers and one cent pieces at the same time. A less complex device for general use fs manufactured in Christchurch and has found a ready market in Australia and the Pacific Islands as well as locally.

So much so that a minor storm has erupted across the Tasman where a Melbourne columnist, writing in the Melbourne “Herald” draws attention to the irregular dimensions of coins produced at the Royal Mint in Canberra.

This fact, disclosed for the first time by the precision made New Zealand product, seems to have caused some red faces. Coin sizes in Australia are set by Act of Parliament and a Victorian member proposed taking the question to the “House.”

“What’s Canberra doing with our 10 cent coins” asks columnist Don Peterson, “Starving them as a hedge against inflation?” All because the Aussie ten is about ,08mm thinner than it used to be.

With precision Counters this is important and manufacturers of machines like coins to be uniform in size. Imagine parking meters jammed with the bean lumped shape used by the Lydians.