US Half Dollar Upside Down?

US coins rotate along horizontal axis (top of design is at the top for each side). Medals rotate along the vertical axis (top of designs are on top when turned)

Our toilets also spin the other way when we flush them.

From the US Mint FAQs:

Also, makes it easy to see that there is no 3rd side to a coin.
Now that is one more coin puzzel for today. Yet when you look at the average coin book, Every photo of all coins are shown with the reverse right side up. This would make people think that our coins are all made that way. Coin books, such as the Red Book, should have the reverses upside down as they are real life.

The "reason" that American coins are made that way is because most European silver coins of the late 1700s, including British coins, were made that way. As can be seen by the very terms "coin orientation" and "medal orientation", the use of which predates the American revolution.

That doesn't really answer the question, though, but just moves it back. Why did the British make coins that way at that time? There doesn't seem to be a rational explanation. It certainly wasn't tradition on their part, since British coinage tended to flip-flop between coin and medal orientation.

For some early methods of coinage manufacture, coin orientation made sense. The roller press, for instance: a device not unlike an old-fashioned clothes wringer, or the machines used to make elongated pennies. If you load the two die-rolls into the machine facing the same way, then the coins produced will have coin orientation. This is a valid reason for some European coinages, but neither Britain nor America ever used roller presses to strike coinage. Perhaps all the other mints in the 1700s were simply copying the results of the roller press (coins with coin orientation), without copying the method of manufacture.

For other coinage production methods, die alignment is purely a matter of choice. If you're going to go to the effort of deliberately "aligning" two dies rather than having random alignment, you've really only got two options.

Great discussion! Threads like this are a big reason of why I love spending time on this Forum.

Not really. If in an Album, place on a table, open to the reverse, walk around to the other side of the table. Now most coins will be right side up again.
Of course there is always those oddball rotated reverses making the trips around the table frequent.


However, only good for coins on the computer.
Now if you try using a mirror, you now end up with coins in reverse too.
Some of these problems may well be the reason magicians started with the 2 headed coins.