Newbie Question: The 1976 Quarter

Oh NO! You mean now I have to learn the periodic table? I've already resisted that with my small rock & mineral collection!!

Not joking, it works because silver is the most reflective of metals. It reflect maybe 90% of the light that passes through the tissue that hits it compared to maybe 40% of the light for a coppernickel clad coin. So the silver coin looks much whiter through the tissue.

AG is the abbreviation for Argentum the latin word for silver.

There are no potassium coins, so you won't have to learn K.

You got the easy ones.

I really am having trouble with this one. 40% silver coins are made from 100.9% silver?

Those are it except for practical purposes all of the high speed coins are heavily marked. They also have rough uneven surfaces as opposed to the mint set quality coins that have flat surfaces. They are apparent at a glance they are so different.

I do have a couple high speed versions which are fairly clean but they still look very different that the others.

The irony is they made these high speed coins over a few days in July because they reinterpreted the law to mean they had to strike 14 million coins rather than it being the upper limit. There was no demands so the coins were all dumped in 55 gallon barrels and rolled into storage.

When the others were gone in late-'76 or in '77 they began making sets of these poorer quality coins. Sales were as dismal as the coins until around November of 1980 when they were briefly available at less than silver spot. The prices were raised and sales crashed again. Most of the ones purchased for less than spot went straight into the melting furnaces.

Despite the very high mintage and poor quality of these coins they are rarely seen. They might never have a premium but if you see a set in plastic without the white strip that's it. They are distinct so I consider them the 5th type of bicentennial quarter.

I did neglect to mention that almost the entire mintage of the high speed version was melted ~1982. Sales are unknown but they obviously were not very high. Everyone who wanted these bought the nice ones in 1976 and everybody who bought the poor ones later had no interest in reordering.