View of SF Mint Activity on You Tube

[DWLange]

I was scanning through old movies about my home town of San Francisco, and I found one from 1940 with scenes shot at the mint. It shows what appear to be WL Halves fresh from the presses. The mint scenes are at approximately the four-minute mark:

 

[James_OldeTowne]

Really cool! It looks like the freshly minted coins are being rinsed in a hot solution of some kind.

[coinman1794]

My guess is that rinse is happening to the planchets before striking to clean them up after punching, but this is a very interesting clip!

 

 

[123cents]

Cool video. I enjoyed seeing all the sites of the city in 1940.

[RWB]

Neat! Gold bars being moved. Hot rinse of the planchets in the whitening solution (looks like quarter blanks), then half dollars coming out of the press. Too bad the film of press operators wasn't longer - might resolve some lingering questions. (One operator per press - odd. Should have been 1/4 with the automatic feeders. Maybe separate denominations?)

[RockMyAmadeus]

The narrator doesn't know better...he says "here the copper, nickel, gold and silver coins are being made..."

 

Oops.

[bsshog40]

Pretty cool video. Not much has changed for SF except everything is in color now. I thought that was pretty neat how they turned the cable cars around. Thanks for the link David.

[WoodenJefferson]

 

You don't think the number of operators on these automatic feed presses was staged for the cameras?

[DWLange]

Definitely staged. One press operator would oversee three or four presses at a time by the 1940s.

 

Here's another link to enjoy. I've used some of these photos in my books:

 

http://sflib1.sfpl.org:82/search~S0?/d%22mint%22/dmint/1%2C6%2C115%2CE/2exact&FF=dmint+buildings+new+exterior&1%2C25%

 

 

[CRO-migration]

Cool. Thanks for sharing.

[SkyMan]

Fun stuff, thanks!

[jesbroken]

Thanks David, for sharing. Quite enjoyable, actually all of the film clip was quite entertaining, especially for the period.

Jim

[sfchemist-migration]

Excellent, thank you for sharing this film clip. I was born and raised in San Francisco and it was very interesting seeing the good ol' days.