AT THE MINT

Hokitika Guardian, 3 May 1928, Page 1

AT THE MINT

ROMANCE OF THE MONEY MAKERS.

By .). M. N. JEFFRIES, who describes bow money is made at the Royal .Mint.)

Every coin which loaves the Mint is

a splendid survivor. Inside the Mint its life, in its various stages, is an interminable series of tests and rejections and refining processes.. Its alloy is tested by chemists in bar form, it is drawn through a 100-li.p. mangle, passed through water, re-heated in an airtight furnace, passed through water, rerolled, recooled. You would think the metal was by now ready lor coining. Not so. Bolivia, to use a whimsical American phrase. Discs are haphazardly cut from the metal strips, to test them for weight first. At the Mint they say that the weigher “ keeps a hit on the heavy side,”' -but what he does is to allow, against the wear and tear of processes to come, a full quarter of a grain, an entire, heaped-up, clod-hopping lumpish quarter of a grain. Not the breath of a decimal more, sir.

Now, then, the time has come for striking the coin? Not so, Bolivia. There is more to he done yet. The coins are cut blank first. You must almost shout to be heard in the room where this is done, ns the punches come down hang. bang, bang upon tbe metal strips, cutting from them endless pairs of blanks, which slide then out of tbe machine over a honeycombed tray, through the hollows of which imperfect coins fall like sinners into oblivion. The unused framework of the bars 40 per cent of tho whole—goes hack to be remelted. The blanks pass to a man who stands at a large inclined grid, punched with holes the exact -size of a required coin all over its surface. Over this all day he spreads coins, rubbing them over it with bis extended fingers, so that any of the imperfect which mav have escaped the first test of the machine fall through beneath his mingled scrutiny and touch. The edges of the innumerable coins are sharp and bis bands are ungloved, but, be says, be does not cut himself. Only the ends of bis fingers grow ratlier callous, as with an eternal gather and sweep and rub, over and over and over, be passes over bis sieve a quarter of a million coins each day. And now they stamp the coins.- Not so, Bolivia. The blanks are- too sott. Rims are raised upon them, they are put into red-hot pigeon-holes in ? rotary furnace, and thence fall, ugly dark discs, into cold water. Thence again they are taken to an adjoining room, and there they go mad. Diet are cast into wild, revolving, open canisters tilted like mortars, and there, out of a small sea of sulphuric acid, they rise in breaking and clashing waves. . *

Presently shining red coals from a furnace are cast amid them, for an extraordinary moment the waves o. coins seem to drip blood, and then all at once spring to a frosted white Water is added and tbe canisters whirl on the discs as they scour each other cleaning themselves, till presently they are glittering, and you can see rising from the waves of acid and water what you have often read of but never seen, true silver spray. . .. Then they are dried in hot-air hollers, such as vou used to glimpse in hairdressers’ 'before women’s hair became obsolete, and "are fed, % t|ie most

part at least, through tubes into the coining-presses. I here metal frogs’ legs seize each blank and hold it for an instant of honour, when a die squeezes upon it. and it falls below, the King’s shilling. Forty thousand pieces a day thus fall knighted from each press, odd. jovial machines which dance at their work, and nod their noses at you with a “Now I’ve done it” air as the die comes down.

So all is completed ? Nay, not so Brittania. All silver coins must go to a room like an astronomer’s study, lull of cold, intellectual balances, which, with almost inhuman judgment, as they weigh the coins, sort them into those of correct weight, those a shadow heavy and those a shadow light. Not alone this, hut those shadows of difference as the Mint desires. Thence the coins go to the “ringers.” human miracles these, men who sit I'efore small circular anvils and on these with endlessly flitting wrists cast the coins in such a swift stream that you have a silver rainbow in the air. lighting upon and leaping from the anvil. So continuous is the fall of the pieces that it forms a seamless note of sound. They listen to it, and at the slightest alteration of tone, stop and take the flawed piece from the heap where it has fallen, and then start again. The ultimate test of all is vet to

come. In hags the coins are taken to where at table height an endless band of leather passes over and between rollers. Three men are seated there; one seizes a bag and spreads the corns from its mouth upon the moving band so that none overlaps and never a one falls, and so on the band they go past his colleague at the rate ol 1.000 a minute, and he gazes incessantly at them and picks with smooth speed from that river flow any that have the least final flaw. So they i.re drawn between the rollers and viewed on their other side b\ eyes, go to their fate in the world, 2millioiis of them in the year. . They are 1 automatically counted, put into bags j which are meticulously weighed, and j are sent to the banks upon their ! demand.