Kaiser,

Amen to that!

NumisdudeTX

Kaiser,

It was the official Mint of France that produced the first “curved” coins in 2009 if I remember the year right – 5 years before the U.S. Mint asked them for technical help to do the same in 2014 for the baseball commemorative curved coins.
The official Mint if Italy produced the first ringed bi-metallic coins a couple of decades ago with a special process. The U.S. Mint copied that process by asking them for technical help only once in 2000 for the Library of Congress ringed bi-metallic gold/platinum commemorative coins & hasn’t done it since.
The U.S. Mint uses almost exclusively coinage presses made in Europe, mostly Germany & coin cancelling/waffle process machines made in The Netherlands. And the Mint for almost 200 years used the reducing lathe invented in France used in coin pre-production process. The U.S. Mint also relies on machinery made in Switzerland to produce coins & medals. Almost nothing at the U.S. Mint is “USA” per se, except the employees!
In the 1990s mostly, the U.S. Mint used some special packaging with “Made in UK” or “Printed in UK” that was printed on the packaging. The Mint used to send some of it’s commemorative coins dies to the Royal Mint of Canada in Ottawa to have them specially plated to last longer. The Mint’s branded logo tote bags are made in Vietnam!
Thanks to mostly Europe, the U.S. Mint can do its job today, but it is far from original “American” ingenuity. Sad!

NumisdudeTX

morgan,

Thanks for the info. I’ll have to look up the design. If it’s by the official Mint of France, the Monnaie de Paris, it is probably a great design.

NumisdudeTX

France will be added to that small but illustrious list on May 7 when it issues a Marriage for All mini-medal and silver coin celebrating the country’s 10th anniversary of marriage equality.

Kaiser,

Amen! It takes not only a village to make a healthy Democracy, it takes a widely diverse village population to make a successful village.

NumisdudeTX

LGBTQIA2+…it grows every year…
The Royal Canadian Mint commemorated the decriminalization of homosexuality a few years ago with circulating coins & a colorized silver coin. The Royal Mint of the UK produced a gay Pride coin recently & the Bank of England issued it’s first polymer 50-pound banknote (the highest denomination note) featuring the famous gay mathematician/computer scientist/WWII Nazi Enigma code breaker Alan Turing, who was prosecuted (& chemically castrated) under the anti-homosexual laws of England & committed suicide at age 41. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II pardoned him posthumously a few years ago.
And in the good old USA many conservative Republicans want to get up inside females’ uteruses by legislation taking personal rights away & they want to ban the art of Drag (pantomime dames), dating back to ancient Greece, instead of dealing with a debt ceiling & bank failures & high inflation etc. Celebrating diversity like Canada & England do with numismatic tributes to more minorities is a good example for the USA Congress to follow.

NumisdudeTX

Thanks for the correction. After previous post on phone I didn’t want to go back and redo my thought. Sometimes my fingers get ahead of my brain. Didn’t mean to imply exclusivity. And wasn’t sure if killer or murderer would have been better. And I had brain fart of serial killers. I don’t like leaving the page to search because sometimes when I click back on coin news it refreshes and I lose everything I wrote earlier. Very soon after Lincoln and his successor Grant, the parties seemed to flip. I believe the carpet bagging and radical republican ideas and reconstruction wasn’t panning out as planned. But the main point I was trying to make was many just used 2 names. Then suddenly it was a craze. And it seemed top of mind that democrats held more 3 name or initial nom de plume. It was Herbert J Hoover, but most of the time referred to as just hoover, or Herbert hoover. And right after him it seems the trend began. FDR, HDT, DDE JFK LBJ RMN then back to 2 name Carter and Reagan to 4 GHWB BC GB or just Dubya. BO DJT and now LGB.

DDE was a Republican. So was US Grant.
JW Booth and LH Oswald were murderers, but neither was a serial killer.

The ‘great deciders”, you can always come up with a good one Kaiser. Although I would have said the impossible part in getting these folks to think.

https://www.moneymetals.com/news/2023/05/01/ongoing-us-mint-failures-bring-discredit-to-america-002733