A Look At 1801 Half Dime Lm-2 Die States

I first posted this 1801 Half Dime in the grading section where I just revealed that PCGS called it an EF-45. As I stated there, the 1801 Half Dime is a very scrace coin, and finding higher grade examples is quite difficult. When Daniel W. Valentine wrote his classic work on the Half Dime die varieties, he seemed to have only a few very low grade examples of the 1801 Half Dime at his disposal. As it turned out his V-1 and V-2 varieties were the same variety. How could he have made a mistake like that? Here might be an esplaination.

The at the top is a later die state than the coin below. As you might note there is a huge arc like die break inside the stars on the obverse of this earlier die state piece. How could that be?



The reason is that the die used to strike the first coin was split from top to bottom. The break begins in the "T" in "LIBERTY" and goes all the way to Ms. Libtery's drapery. As a result of this the right side of the die was pushed up (The obverse die is top die in the screw press) with caused the first break to virtually disappear. It is visible if you look in that area with a 10X glass.

Looking at these two coins, one could easily think that a different obverse die was used to strike each of them. It seems impossible that the huge, arc shaped die break could "disappear" on a later striking but it did.

BTW I don't own the second coin. A collector was kind enough to let me photographic at numisamtic event, and I was lucky enough to get a decent picture of the piece under less than perfect conditions.