To celebrate my 1000th post here at CoinTalk I thought it would be approporiate to hold a contest.
The Contest:
This contest is open to all young numismatists, I'm defining that as 14 years old and younger. There are three questions to answer. Please word your answer clearly and cite your reference sources so all may learn.
It is possible that the references entrants provide might differ from the reference I have used to establish the questions, and that's fine as long as the research gets done and cited.
The winner will be the first to post the correct answers to all three questions. The post date/time of each response will be used to judge who submitted the correct answers first.
This contest begins with this posting and ends when I declare a winner. Replies to this contest should be posted in this thread. If you have the correct answer your post will give you an earlier date/time that any subsequent posts. Hopefully we will have a winner by tomorrow, Monday, evening.
The prize: Three 2" x 6" Capital Plastics holders. These holders are old, from my first type set back in the 19XX's, well lets just say they are from the last Century

They are still quite servicable, and have a white center layer.
The holders are:
US Type Cents Capital # CP-412A
US Type Nickels Capital # CP-412B
US Type Dimes Capital # CP-412C
A picture of these holders is attached below.
Here are the three questions.
Question 1. When was the Act of Congress that established the US Mint passed?
Question 2. What was the first coin produced by the US Mint.
Question 3. Name the US Mints, past and present.
You may begin.......