Post Your Tiny Coins!

Very nice, Nancy!

I find it fascinating that of all the nations that were on the decimalized Spanish dollar standard, the US was one of the first to do away with the silver 5 cent piece in favor of a larger nickel piece.

I'll have to dig out some of mine for this thread; I have some very nice Japanese 5 sen coins in my binder.

Very worn.

Great Britain 1842 4d #731 16mm

From the junk bin: South Africa 3d.

Thought I would put up my smallest again for a comparison to a nickel
16th Farthing 7mm .23 grams 1848
1 cent 15mm 1gram 1904
nickel 1943 21.21mm 5 grams

I've never fully understood the model fractional farthings. Ignoring why anyone would need something as small as 1/64th of a penny, were these official mint products and legal tender? Non-legal tender patterns? Private mint products?

Thanks! That does make sense. I unfortunately have never acquired any of the "real" 1/4, 1/3, or 1/2 farthings, but was familiar with them.

One more contribution for this thread (old pic, sorry for the quality:



These are obscure Japanese coins known as "mameita gin" or silver beans. Before the Tokugawa shogunate came up with fixed silver and gold denominations, silver was legal tender in the form of a "chogin" which was a roughly cigar size and shaped ingot that would be stamped with official minter's punches to guarantee the fineness, which ranged from about .800 to .125 over the course of about 1700-1860. Obviously, making change was a problem when your standard silver coin weighs about 170g. Enter the Mameita gin, a much smaller nugget used for making change. These were all standardized according to fineness, but weight and shape were uncontrolled--minters simply dripped molten silver into a tub of sand and hit it with a die as it was cooling. The individual pieces would be very carefully weighed, and packaged up in a sealed wrapper of a specified weight. If an individual coin was needed, the wrapper would be broken and the coin validated for circulation by a banker.

Specific to this thread, the itty bitty (I think 8mm) Mameita gin at the top is the smallest I have ever seen. It's nearly spherical, weighing about 1.3g. The largest is just barely larger than a dime but weighs a whopping 11.8g!

Very nice!