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Posted 12/10/2008 08:07 am
Does a slab offer better protection than a 2x2 flip, coin album or coin cabinet? Yes. Anything that separates bright shiny metal from the atmosphere that's trying to destroy it is good for a coin, and a well-sealed slab is about as airtight an object as our technology can give you.
Will a coin change or degrade with time, even if stored in a slab? Some coins will, yes. If I understand slabbing terminology correctly, they assign colour codes to high grade bronze/copper coins, RD for red, RB for red-brown, BN for brown, and so on. But I believe that none of the TPGs will guarantee that the coin will remain perpetually the colour indicated on the slab.
Does a slab offer perfect, eternal protection for a coin? No. Or rather, the answer is "probably not". Frankly, we don't know what long-term storage inside a slab will do to a coin; slabs haven't been around for centuries, so we can't honestly say what a slabbed coin will look like in a few centuries time. The TPGs have probably done artificial aging experiments on their plastics and resins, but the only way to really find out how they perform is to put coins in them and wait for a few hundred years.
The archaeologists and museum curators of the future might well be in awe of our incredible foresight and wisdom in slabbing our coins. But if the history of coin preservation is anything to go by, it's far more likely that those archaeologists will instead be cursing our bones for being so stupid as to deliberately insert our rare and valuable coins into those "slab" things.
Will a coin change or degrade with time, even if stored in a slab? Some coins will, yes. If I understand slabbing terminology correctly, they assign colour codes to high grade bronze/copper coins, RD for red, RB for red-brown, BN for brown, and so on. But I believe that none of the TPGs will guarantee that the coin will remain perpetually the colour indicated on the slab.
Does a slab offer perfect, eternal protection for a coin? No. Or rather, the answer is "probably not". Frankly, we don't know what long-term storage inside a slab will do to a coin; slabs haven't been around for centuries, so we can't honestly say what a slabbed coin will look like in a few centuries time. The TPGs have probably done artificial aging experiments on their plastics and resins, but the only way to really find out how they perform is to put coins in them and wait for a few hundred years.
The archaeologists and museum curators of the future might well be in awe of our incredible foresight and wisdom in slabbing our coins. But if the history of coin preservation is anything to go by, it's far more likely that those archaeologists will instead be cursing our bones for being so stupid as to deliberately insert our rare and valuable coins into those "slab" things.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
