If you’re having a hard time choosing which presidential candidate to vote for in this year’s upcoming election, you’re in luck. The voting coin will provide you with an answer. Don’t like the result? Go with the best of five.

Q: How can you tell what the large date and the small date on the 1982 pennies are? What the 4 different 1982 pennies?

A: The large and small date are pretty easy to tell when you have them both together. The other variations are based on the metal content. For a more detailed description, here is a quote from a site discussing that very issue:

Partway through production of 1982 Lincoln cents, the U.S. Mint changed the coins’ composition from brass (95 percent copper and 5 percent zinc) to one that is predominantly zinc (a core of 99.2 percent zinc and 0.8 percent copper with a copper barrel plating). Cents dated 1982 come in both metallic varieties - and to complicate matters even more, there are large-date and small-date versions in both compositions. Viewed side by side, the large and small dates are relatively easy to tell apart, and there isn’t much money riding on the difference, since both are quite common. Distinguishing between the brass and zinc cents is easiest by weight, rather than color: The brass cent is heavier, at 3.11 grams versus 2.5 grams for the zinc cent. Again, both kinds are common. In all, there are seven different varieties of 1982 cents. Just one combination is missing: There is no small-date cent in brass from the Denver Mint.

(via pcgs)

I’m sure that most folks have heard the expression, “I was just joshing you”. Did you know that old chestnut has numismatic origins? It came from a guy named Josh Tatum. The story goes like this.

In 1883, the design of the nickel was changed from the Shield design to the Liberty. The first design had the familiar obverse, but the first reverse was revolutionary, by coin standards. Nowhere on the coin, obverse or reverse, did the denomination appear. The Shield nickels had 5 Cents spelled out clearly on the reverse, but the Liberty nickels didn’t. Instead, the reverse had a large Roman numeral V to denote 5, but it didn’t say V cents. Today we call them 1883 no cents nickels. This became popular amongst the more unsavory people of the time, namely con artists. The physical size of a nickel and a $5 gold coin is very similar. The nickel is thicker, and has a plain edge. The $5 has a reeded edge. So these hoaxters took the new nickels with a large Roman V on the reverse, filed the reeding on the edge, had them gold plated, and started passing them as $5 gold coins.

A number of people were prosecuted for this activity. A prominent dentist in Philadelphia had increased the value of a few nickels into $27,000. The problem with putting these folks away was that the only law they had violated was that they had committed fraud. There was no Federal law otherwise to convict them on. The Congress corrected that error quickly, and the nickel design was changed to include the word Cents.

Josh Tatum (remember him? Just Joshin?) was one of the aforementioned con men. He filed the edge of some of those new nickels, had them gold plated, and passed them as $5. He was caught, arrested and tried for fraud. It was hard to find witnesses against him because not many people wanted to admit that they were duped, but enough came forward to testify in court. When the witnesses were asked, none could say that Mr. Tatum had ever bought anything that cost more than 5 cents, and he had never asked for any change. He simply bought an item for 5 cents, paid with what appeared to be a $5 gold coin, and accepted the change of $4.95. What I haven’t told you about Mr. Tatum is that he was a deaf-mute, and could not ask for any change, or tell the vendor that he had made a mistake. He was exonerated for the most part. One story says he walked out of court a free man. Another report says he spent 2 weeks in jail, presumably for an unrelated charge.

Is this a true story? I could be Joshin’ you.

(Written by Tom Matthews of the USA Coin Group)

Twenty years ago a Texas man began innocently accumulating Eisenhower Dollars. He now has 175,000 of them and they’re for sale in one lot on eBay.

“I started collecting when they stopped making them, but for no particular reason. It was just something to do. I’d find them in convenience stores, ask for them in change or buy them at face value when I ran across them. But you don’t find them in circulation now,” Michael Brown says.

He has a web site where you can see a picture of the mountain of coins, giving you an idea of the vast quantity. They remind me of Scrooge McDuck in his pool of gold coins.

By the way, the man shown in the picture isn’t Michael Brown, it’s just a security guard watching over the coins.

A landlord was cleaning out the apartment of a recently diseased man and decided to pry open an old stove before throwing it away.

Inside the oven was over $4,000 of coins, and gold and silver bars.

Talk about lucky.