Making a bag of gold

[RWB]

After gold coins were struck, but before they were counted, they were weighed and sorted. Even though every coin might be within legal tolerance, each bag of gold had its own weight tolerance. Until reliable automatic scales became available, this work was done by the Adjusters. Here's how a bag of gold was assembled.

 

Mixing Gold Coins When Preparing Bags

Individual coins have legal tolerances for deviation for standard weight. However, each bag of gold coins also had a specific weight and a small tolerance above or below that weight was permitted. This avoided the situation of a bag of $10 gold eagles being made up of mostly light or heavy coins, and thus weighing in total much less or more than it should.

 

Using a bag of $5,000 in eagles, 500 pieces, as an example, the operation of mixing the coins is as follows. The counter places five hundred eagles taken from the box of “heavies” in the scale pan, and notes the approximate amount of overweight. She then removes from the pan a number of coins, five or ten at a time, and replaces them with the same number of coins taken from the box of “lights.” If the total weight is still too great, she repeats the operation, and so on until she gets the five hundred coins to weigh the proper amount.

 

["From Mine to Mint" draft 4.]

[RGT]

Why not just take 250 from the box of "heavies" and 250 from the box of "lights"?

 

[ModCrewman-migration]

I visited the ANA museum in Colorado Springs a few weeks ago and I believe there is a "gold bag" scale in the museum, showing the extremely narrow tolerances of a bag. Am I correct in that recollection Roger?

[RWB]

Not sure about the ANA museum bag scale.... The tolerance on $20,000 in DE was about 5 grains.

 

By starting with all heavy (or all light) the adjuster could work more quickly than if the two were mixed.

[RGT]

By starting with all heavy and adjusting down you assure that all bags will be "high in band". It seems that starting with 250 each would be more likely to come close to the middle of the band without the need to adjust.

 

Maybe the scale needed two compartments so you could keep the light and heavy separate initially in case adjustments needed to be made.

 

I guess you can only report the way things were done. It's a bit late to suggest alternatives.

[physics-fan3.14]

Not sure about the ANA museum bag scale.... The tolerance on $20,000 in DE was about 5 grains.

 

By starting with all heavy (or all light) the adjuster could work more quickly than if the two were mixed.

 

5 grains? Holy !

 

Just a quick conversion.... 5 grains is about 300 milligrams.

[ModCrewman-migration]

Not sure about the ANA museum bag scale.... The tolerance on $20,000 in DE was about 5 grains.

 

By starting with all heavy (or all light) the adjuster could work more quickly than if the two were mixed.

If you would like an image of such a scale for inclusion in your book, I'm about 95% certain that the scale there was of the nature you mention. It may be worth a call down there just to see.

[RWB]

Thanks! I'll see what Doug Mudd has to say.

[SPeck95512]

Once you complete this book, you're going to have a plethora of copies already sold right here on the boards...myself included.

 

Keep up the good work.

[Swampboy]

Fascinating.

[RockMyAmadeus]

Hey Roger...were the coins jostled enough for there to be any significant gold dust loss in the bags? And if so, was it recovered?

[RWB]

Rock -

Yes. It was common practice to burn the bags (and anything else that had been used to store or handle gold) in an old covered crucible. The ashes then went into the sweeps for crushing and gold/silver recovery.

 

Some Swiss bankers would deliberately agitate bags of gold coins to scrape off gold dust. They then sold the coins as if they were full weight, and burnt the bags to recover gold.

 

Several months ago, a poster on PCGS boards had a gold coin bag, and on careful cleaning he recovered several flecks of gold. There were photos posted, but since I am not permitted to post ATS I can't give you the message title.

 

RWB

 

[RWB]

PS: Empty gold coin bags occasionally turn up in auctions and dealer inventory. There is at least one in a future Florida United Numismatists (FUN) show auction.

 

Dirty, unwashed bags are more likely to have gold flecks imbeded in the fibers than clean bags....but you might find nothing.

[PerryHall]

Seems a little silly on the mint's part. It isn't likely the coins would be always kept together in the sealed bag and the bag would never be openned and the coins distributed individually.

[RWB]

In a fully convertible gold standard the unit of money was a specific quantity of fine gold. Thus, the bag was guaranteed by the government to contain a specific quantity of money, not dollars. 1,000 DE were required to weigh 1,075 troy ounces, they also happened to have a face value of $20,000 but that was only a convenience. It was the weight of fine gold that was money - not a dollar.

 

This relationship is completely lost in modern financial transactions, and very very few of the so-called "gold bugs" understand the concept, either.

 

Lastly, double eagles and eagles did not circulate effectively in the domestic economy. Most stayed in their original bags until melted by a foreign company or bank as part of international payments - even there, they were nothing but "stamped bullion."