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[Vess1]

I was talking with a guy the other day and we were making rough guesses at what the actual population of a given Morgan date and MM, (standard business strikes), would still be in existence today. Basically rough guesses at the percentages left anywhere in existence. What's left that hasn't been buried, melted or lost forever.

I remembered reading something in the Red Book about some act that made them melt down a bunch of Morgans at some point in time. So I read it and it says the Pittman Act of 1918 caused 270,232,722 Morgans to be melted down.

I added up all the mintage figures and came up with a little over 570 million total minted, up to 1904. Which is key because the 1921s wouldn't have been in existence when the melt down went into effect.

So you take into account the 270+ million melted down in 1918 and we can note that, at maximum only about 300 million pre-1921 Morgans could possibly exist today. They melted 47% of them!

BTW, if anyone's curious, that would be 15,916,707 pounds of Morgans! Or, 7,958 tons. About 318 modern day truck loads. That's 208,889,894 troy ounces of pure silver. About 2.3 billion dollars worth of silver by todays price. All melted for bullion. (We'll never know the cost of manufacturing, transporting and melting it all again.)

Anyway....... I was wondering if anybody had any info on what were the bulk of the coins that hit the melting pots and where was all this done? Were they melting at all the mints? Was it even done at the mints? It's probably safe to assume that some years took a huge hit and bore the brunt of the melting while other years may have (for the most part) escaped unscathed. Does anybody even have a remote idea? Were worn coins targeted or did it even matter?

I ask strictly out of curiosity because it sure makes things interesting. An 1893-O for example had a mintage of 300,000. From there, we don't really know if 5% or 62% of those could have been melted. Just from this act. Not even taking into account how many of them have been lost or destroyed around the world.