Posted 11/24/2015 10:02 am
I believe that in the United States the term was coined back early in the last century. People learned you could take common and very cheap tokens that were intended for nickelodeons and various vending machines and fill the center hole with lead to fool other machines into accepting them as nickels. These other machines were typically pay telephones and the owners of the telephone lost half this sum since they split proceeds with the phoine companies. To combat this phone owners bought complex token acceptors that would only work with a very complexly shaped token that was sold by the hotel for 5c. There are some 700 different of these telephone tokens and almost all from Illinois with the bulk from Chicago.
It's not unusual to still see these alterred "plugged nickels" in large accumulations of tokens. Most I've seen are large holed Mills Vending tokens, which if I recall, were made and used chiefly in Chicago. My experience here is pretty limited though. I'm more familiar with the phone tokens.
The phone tokens are really interesting. Many had mintages of only 1000 and the attrition on them has simply been staggering. Huge numbers were melted in the scrap drives of WWII and unless you know what they are they look like just a piece of junk metal so are often discarded. I collected them a couple years before I even knew what they were. There are only a handful of collectors. It wouldn't surprise me if only about half a million of all 700 designs exist and some of these are extremely rare or unique.
I suppose the "plug nickels" get even less love than the phone tokens though. I never even thought of saving them before now.
It's not unusual to still see these alterred "plugged nickels" in large accumulations of tokens. Most I've seen are large holed Mills Vending tokens, which if I recall, were made and used chiefly in Chicago. My experience here is pretty limited though. I'm more familiar with the phone tokens.
The phone tokens are really interesting. Many had mintages of only 1000 and the attrition on them has simply been staggering. Huge numbers were melted in the scrap drives of WWII and unless you know what they are they look like just a piece of junk metal so are often discarded. I collected them a couple years before I even knew what they were. There are only a handful of collectors. It wouldn't surprise me if only about half a million of all 700 designs exist and some of these are extremely rare or unique.
I suppose the "plug nickels" get even less love than the phone tokens though. I never even thought of saving them before now.
Time don't fly, it bounds and leaps.
