A DAY AT THE MINT.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXVI, Issue 1, 6 January 1906, Page 41

A DAY AT THE MINT.

Story of an Australian Sovereign.

In the l*»t issue of “Lafe"’ W. A. Somerset has an interesting article on the Australian mints. He says:

“The Mint pays, nominally, £3 17/IOJd. per oz., but deduets 3d. per oz., as coinage charge, on parcels of less than 500 ©z. (with a minimum charge of six •hillings), 2d. per oz. between 500 and 1000 oz., and IJd. per oz. on 1000 oz. and over. Deposits up to 1000 oz. are paid for by cheque a fortnight from date of deposit, whilst depositors of over 1000 oz. may claim payment in actual coin. In reality, the banks are the only depositors who take coin in exchange for gold, the head offices taking delivery at the Mint. In England, conditions governing minting are different. There, the Bank of England is bound by law to purchase gold at £3 17/9 per ' standard ounce. The Royal Mint will accept gold from anyone, but as the Bank of England has the first claim to its services, and otter depositors may be obliged to wait an indefinite time for payment, the Bank practically monopolises -the business. The Royal Mint, by the way, receives the gold already refined, and merely brings it to standard value and coins it, making no charge for the minting. It pays £3 17/10J per ounce, so that the Bank has a margin of lid. per ounce on which to conduct its refining and make its profits. THE MINT AS A SHOW PLACE. One of the Mint’s functions, apparently-, is to act as a sort of object-lesson to the world in general, for a steady- strea.ni of visitors —armed with the necessary passports—trickles through the building the whole year round, averaging, probably, twenty- per day. One wonders that the staff does not tire of explain ing the methods and —what to them have long ceased to be—the wonders of coining. But the staff is very patient and very courteous withal. So the daily explanation goes on —so many sovereigns to the ton. so much copper to so much gold, and so on. The onlv number we discovered whose patience" was at all frayed was one who on the occasion of th? last visit of a press photographer was asked to pose alongside the machine of which he had charge. The exposure only lasted fifteen seconds, but the camera, man strolled off to look at some machinery, and returned a quarter of an hour later, to find his sitter still holding himself rigid, and perspiring in the effort to look pleasant. His remarks on press photographers are •till tinged with bitterness. THE THREE AUSTRALIAN MINTS. Any reader who is fortunate enough to have an Australian sovereign to examine, will notio? a microscopic letter benbath the hind foot of St. George’s horse, representing one of the three Australian Mints—Melbourne. Sydney, or Perth. But it is tte British Government that guarantees the integrity of the sovereign, and the Mints although Australian owned, administered by the Imperia] Government —branches, in short, of the Royal Mint on Tower Hill, with the Chancellor of the Exchequer ex-officio head. The charges made for coining pay the working ex penses and any profits on the years transactions are paid to the respective States. It is an interesting bit. of history- to >iote>that in the year 1852-3, when the first gold vields of Australia were sent to England, 12,664,125 sovereigns were coined—a larger sum than the entire money issue of Elizabeth, .Tames 1., Charles 1.. Cromwell. Charles 11., James 11., William 111-, Anne, George I. and 11.. and Wiliam IV. The Perth Mint, opened in 1889, has just now the largest annual output (amounting to about 4 J millions, as compared with 4 millions by Melbourne, and 3J. millions by Sydney) ; the Sydney Mint is the oldest (1855), whilst the Melbourne Mint has manufactured most ■overeigns since its opening (1872), and holds the record of obtaining the moot accurate results of any Mint in the

world. Accuracy, indeed, is the keynote of minting. Tte Mint authorities have learned by force of circumstances what the business man of the twentieth century is gradually realising, tliat it is untiring attention to the smallest details that makes an enterprise successful. Thus the phrase, ’’waste-product,” finds no place in the winter's dictionary. Every inch of floor is swept daily, and tile dust preserved; the crucibles in which the gold is melted, the very ashes from the coke of the furnaces are carefully ground up, and the whole lot is amalgamated and retorted. Even then the residue is not thrown away, but is shipped to England, to be re-treated for such gold as remains. MODUS OPERANDI. Every deposit of gold lodged at the Mint is melted separately, cast in a mould, and stamped with a number. From both ends of the slug or ingot, a. small piece the size of a bean is clipped, and sent to the assay department, to determine its value. From a visitor’s point of view more spectacular results are obtained by following the slugs rather than the clips, though to the scientifically inclined tte assay department is full of fascination, and to the depositor the result pf the assay of those tiny samples is of vital importance, for it is on it that he receives payment for his deposit. Experience has taught those who handle gold a number of useful facts. One is that gold is never found in a pure state; it is always combined .ith less precious metals —invariably fiver, very frequently baser metals. Another is that in Australia the f‘ . -her north gold is found, the greater is the proportion of sijver. Thus, white Ballarat gold, the “finest in the continent, may have, say, from 3 to 5 per cent, of silver, Gippsland gold will contain 10 to 20 per eent., New South Wales gold 20 to 30 per eent.; and so on till, in Queensland the percentage of silver w ill range a-s high as 40 to 50 per eent.

The assayer sits in front of an assay balance, that is sei up, for protection, in a glass ease. He handles as little as possible with his fingers, but uses a pair of forceps, with which long practice has made him so dexterous that, when busy, his hand looks like some strange bird, darting hither and thither and picking minute grains with unerring beak. His balances are constructed with all the delicacy of a spider’s web—polished brass beam, silver pans and platinum weights, so finely graded that the moisture from a finger and thumb would render them untrue, the lightest of them resembling a tiny, twisted human hair. But it is vastly important that the assayer’s calculations should not be out “in so much as the estimation of a hair,” for a miscalculation of the onc-ten-thousandth part of £ 1 which that hair represents would spell a difference on the year's work of £4OO. So important, indeed, is accuracy in this department, that everything is done in duplicate, by independent assayers, whose results are compared and the mean taken. AN IMPERIAL BAKEHOUSE. But to follow the bullion through the melting-room—the most important bakehouse in the country. It is hero that one gets a fair appreciation of the faet that gold is merely valuable for its purchasing power, ft is here that men “with strong and sinewy arms” nonchalantly dump ten thousand pounds’ worth of gold into the furnace, or throw down an armful of bars worth £5OO each, as if they were so many lengths of iron. “The difference being,” as one of the sinewy-armed brethren remarked, “that if a chunk of iron was missing, we could throw in another; but if a chip of this stuff disappears, we’ve got to stay till it is found.”

As soon as the value of a deposit has been estimated by the assay referred to, it is re;idy for refining. Seven hundred ounces—or thereabouts —are melted in a crucible, a clay is

pushed down to the bottom of the crucible, and a jet of chlorine gas forced through it. Immediately the silver becomes chloride, rises to the surface, and is dipped off, whilst the baser metals pass away in the fumes. The refined gold is poured <off in ingots, and again clips are taken from the opposite ends and sent to the assayers. To the fine gold is added copper—from South Australia—in the proportion of one to eleven, and back it goes to the furnace once more. In an hour it is melted and ready for pouring. A travelling crane is drawn into position. The furnace top is removed, a pair of fbngs adjusted, and out comes the redhot vessel, full of liquid fire, a layer of crimson charcoal floating on its surface to protect it from the air. A number of iron bars, recessed on one side, plain on the other, are damped together to form a succession of moulds. One man, with felt apron and glove, tilts the pot, whilst another manipulates the crane. There is a series of pops as the molten gold runs into the moulds, and in a few minutes £6OOO worth of standard gold has been turned into bars two feet long, two inches wide, and three-eighths of an inch thick. Once more assay-clips are taken out, the bars are trimmed and sent away to the coining-room. THROUGH THE COINING ROOM. The coining process is interesting to watch, but perhaps dull to read about. Therefore, suffice it to say that the iin bars are rolled out by successive rollings till they are reduced to about l-20th of an inch in thickness, and resemble golden bed-slats. Their final treatment consists in being drawn between two fixed rollers so exquisitely adjusted that the thickness of the fillet. as the thinned-out bar is called, does not vary by the ten-thousandth part of an inch. Follows the cutting out of dises —technically “blanks.” Again there is nice adjustment of machinery, the different steam-driven punches varying a minute fraction of an inch in diameter, to suit the varying thickness of the fillets. From each strip is cut a double row of blanks, the “waste” being sent back to the melting room for re-casting.

The gold at this stage is extremely hard, so the blank’ are annealed in a furnace to soften them, are then put, through a press to raise the edge, and finally' handed over to the eoiner, who has in his charge four automatic coining presses. In front of each press stands a pile of blanks. Number one a*>us in, and with one squeeze is nnpresed on both sides, milled round the rim, and drops out a coin of the realm. The average speed of a machine is about sixty per minute, though, at a pinch, it can run up to ninety-two per minute. The dies, which are sent out from the Royal Mint, gtand from 200,000 to 300,000 impressions.

The presses are automatic, one man overseeing four machines, keeping the feeders full and watching keenly for “faults.” A fraction of charcoal may have caused a smudge, a pinhole may have allowed a tiny spark of copper to oxydise and discolour, a minute crack in one of the dies may have marked a hairline —all trifles, but quite ipiougli to send the coins back to the meltingpot. Then come the> final tests: A cunningly arranged device carries the sovereign along a sort of endless belt; first, heads uppermost, then "tails.” so that discrepancies which escaped the first examination may be detected. Then they are sent to the weighingroom to be tried in the balances.. AUTOMATIC MARVEL!*. The machines—there ate a dozen of them, and they cost £250 each—that test the weight of the coins are marvellously ingenious. At one end of a beam hangs a glass disc that as near as is scientifically possible is the exact, weight of a sovereign, at the other end is a hooked pendulum, whose swing is limited to the thickness of three sovereigns. The machines arc driven by water power, and the eoins drop with

more than the regularity of Mjaebeats into the pendulated hook. A coin of the exact weight drops dowa the middle sl»t, a coin that is light by. so much as a thousandth part swings to the left, and one that is as much overwe’ght is dropped to the right, and both are re-melted. It sajrs something for the previous tests that not more than five in one hundred fail at this final trial. Probably because most of us have ao little to do with sovereigns in any considerable quantity there is something surprising in the weight of coins in bulk. We read, for instance, in a novel by a fairly well-known author, that his hero picked up a black bag containing £5OOO in gold, and “dashed down the street hotly pursued by the police.” When it is considered that 935 sovereigns weigh exactly 201 b. we can understand the heat of the hero, sot of the pursuit. Mr Rockefeller’s income for a single year, in sovereigns. would weigh several tons.