PROVO – Crusty old gold miners in Hollywood Westerns bit into gold to see if they’d found the real thing, but biting down on a possibly rare gold coin is no way to determine if it is genuine or counterfeit.

Gold is softer than teeth, so sinking incisors into the precious metal can reveal the real thing, but coins are generally harder and teeth marks damage their value.

The bite test also can deceive: Lead is even softer than gold.

One of the 2,372 Brigham Young University students graduating this week is wrapping up his senior thesis on new methods for testing coins purported to be rare finds.

Jeff Brown, who is completing a bachelor’s degree in physics, used a specialized X-ray machine and an electron microscope to study about 50 coins.

“Back in the old days, people really would take a gold coin and bite it to see if it was real,” Brown said. “Now, with the added value these coins have accumulated, biting them ruins them.”

Using the X-ray spectrometer, Brown was able to plot a spectrum of materials in the coins. For example, he could determine how much silver and how much copper was in a purportedly valuable silver coin.

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This guy at Ask Metafilter has some old piggy banks and wants to know what to do with them. The coins are fairly old, with silver coins and he wants to know what he should do with them.

1. Which way does the Indian face on the Buffalo 5-cent piece?

2. What is the monetary unit of Zaire?

3. What paper money was first released four days following President Kennedy’s assassination?

4. What is nicknamed an “atheist cent”?

5. What is a piefort?

Answers

The title isn’t sage advice about marketing or earning money, it’s the unfortunate truth for the US government due to the rising cost of nickel (the metal, not the coin). Here’s the scoop.

House Democrats have sponsored legislation to change the metal content of coins, outraged that it costs a dime to make a nickel.

House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Domestic and International Monetary Policy Subcommittee Chairman Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., are sponsors of the bill that would give authority to the Treasury Department to change the composition of coins issued by the U.S. Mint to less expensive materials.

The two estimate that by changing the composition of the penny and nickel, the federal government could save more than $100 million annually. Another $300 million could be saved if similar changes were made to the half-dollar, quarter and dime.

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Ken Potter has some.

On Aug. 8, Potter announced that he had acquired “P” and “D” Jefferson dollars and would be offering them for sale.

First he was having them certified as early releases by J.T. Stanton, president of PCI Coin Grading Service, Inc.

Potter, a coin error/variety authority and dealer from Lathrup Village, Mich., explained that while one of his suppliers was looking for $1,000 boxes of John Adams dollars, intending to search for double edge lettering errors and smooth edge errors, he was told by a bank that they had five unopened boxes of the coins that he could purchase.

Upon picking them up, he found that the bank had sold him three boxes of 2007-P Jefferson dollars along with two boxes of Adams dollars. A special seal on the Jefferson dollar boxes reads “DO NOT BREAK SEAL UNTIL AUG 16.”

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