Silver .999 how long has it been used?

I am wondering how long the term .999 has been around in the world of numismatics? I'm sure it wasn't used in the 60's, does anyone know?

What's the oldest silver round that you have? Pics, if ya got em?

 

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http://www.mapsofworld.com/referrals/metals/silver/999-silver-coin.html

 

So, an 1830 Guernsey 8 Doubles was 0.999 silver? That seems awfully early for the refining technology.

 

Refining metals (and removing trace impurities) is a pretty tricky and complicated process. Removing those last couple thousandths of a percent of unwanted material gets exponentially more difficult.

Still, I'd like to learn more about this. What are the earliest .986 gold items that you're aware of? What about 0.999 gold & silver items? I don't have anything in my collection that predates WW2, but I don't have a comprehensive group by any means.

 

I can't defend the link, I only searched for it and it was the best fit with the question. It's confusing to read so I didn't comment.

I agree that ancient technology was much farther advanced than is taught in our schools. Archeologists are surprised all the time by what they find.

 

I've got some Sunshine Mine .999 silver rounds that date from the early eighties.

 

I agree with you Doug that they chose their fineness. But, there is a discrepancy between that and saying they had the ability to do .999 fine. Say the Venetians had a source of gold .989 or .993 fine, then it is easy to blend down to a standard. This is something even the first electrum coins in Lydia did. However, this is different than saying they had a source of 1.000 pure or effectively .999 pure and blended down. Taking away these last few impurities like others have said become progressively more cost and technology prohibitive. Without proof of consistent .999 pure ingots or coins from antiquity, (which I have never seen proof of), one cannot prove they have the ability to make this fine a product. If you have a good metallurgical source to cite .999 pure gold being consistently made in antiquity I would love to read it.

Another way to say it would be if the Venetians COULD make .999 gold consistently, why did they settle on .986? Wouldn't it make more sense they settled on .986 since that was the highest fineness they could consistently produce on an ongoing basis? I doubt that .014 of impurities really made their gold coins stand up better in commerce, which is why US coins were never struck .999.

Doug, yes I also know you have a book listing medieval gold coins as 1.000 fineness. I would like to hear what metallurgy tests they have to back that claim up.

 

Yes I've had a couple from the 80's that I sold, here's one from 1969. Anyone got anything earlier with .999?

http://cgi.ebay.com/1969-BENJAMIN-D...941?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item563f13e92d

 

Um, I'm pretty sure that metallurgy isn't that simple. There are all sorts of processes that let you increase purity up to a specific level, but no further. I don't know whether that's true of the specific processes that were used for gold or silver in antiquity -- it's been many years since I looked at them -- but I have my doubts, especially about silver. (Purifying gold is a lot easier than purifying silver, for a variety of reasons.)

We need BadThad here!

 

As I looked at this example a little closer you can tell that it's been messed with and it don't even say .999. Oh well, back to the drawing board! Anyone got any old .999?

 

According to academia of today, silver was the 3rd metal discovered in aprox 4000 BC. Since silver is able to be found in its native state, it is safe to say that "pure" silver has been used since then. Was their "pure" silver .999? With the amount used I would bet that at least one item fashioned from silver found in its native state was that pure. But we are just splitting hairs. Since mercury was in common use by 750 BC for amalgamations I would hypothesis that silver in a purity of 3 9's has been around and used for 2500 years at least.

Sources

http://neon.mems.cmu.edu/cramb/Processing/history.html
http://mygeologypage.ucdavis.edu/cowen/~GEL115/115ch6.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupellation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metals_of_antiquity

Now back to the OP's question I do not know the first time that .999 was used as a term as it is applied to coinage.

 

I've been Googling around for half an hour or so, and I'm still having some trouble turning up hard numbers. But SoaringEagle's second link includes this final paragraph:

For cupellation, which I believe was about the best process available until the Renaissance, it looks like the limit of purity was somewhere around 98-99%. Repeating the process would just transfer more and more silver into the slag; the silver left behind wouldn't be any more pure.

To get to 99.9% or better, it looks like you need chlorine-based or electrolytic techniques, both of which are exclusively modern (post-1800). Yes, you could travel back in time with modern knowledge and cobble together a system to do better. No, there is no record of anyone doing so.

Now, here's an item stamped "999/1000" and claimed to be from the "mid-1800s":

.999 Fine Silver Perfume Bottle. Very Cool Mid 1800's

 

Oh, my.

Okay, please point me to a source of 1.000 purity gold. Gold is relatively easy to purify, and we have all the resources of modern metallurgy at our fingertips. Surely someone must be producing it, right?

Wrong. Well, almost wrong -- materials scientists do use atomic force microscopy to manipulate single, isolated gold atoms, so you could safely claim that those are 100% pure gold. They've even produced nanoclusters with dozens of gold atoms, and if you work at it, you can produce such clusters with a very low probability of including any other atoms.

But gather enough of them together to make a block that you can weigh, measure, and use as a standard? No. Not even today.

The purest materials that we can produce in bulk today are the semiconductors used to make integrated circuits. Bulk silicon is the basis for these chips, and today we can routinely purify it to better than .999999 (<1 ppm impurity), with certain contaminants controlled at an even lower level (here's a reference). But to get to that level or purity, you need process that are ridiculously complex, finicky, and EXPENSIVE.

So, how do you determine that something is .999 pure if you don't have a 1.000 pure sample for comparison? That's actually really easy. There are ways to separate out and measure contaminants -- it's just that you can't do it without introducing other contaminants. So, for example, suppose I've got a gram of silver. I could take one tenth of it (100 mg), do a separation that gets out 99% or so of the copper it contains, and measure that at (say) 10 micrograms. That shows that the sample was 0.0001 (0.01%) copper. You can do similar procedures to measure other common contaminants, add them all up, and you know how much of your sample was not silver -- and, from that, it's easy to tell how much was silver. This is a branch of chemistry called "quantitative analysis", it's very, very old, and it has never relied on the existence of "100% pure" reference standards.

Yes, there are economic reasons to debase coinage. But they also "did not want to produce pure metal" because they quickly reached a point where small increases in purity meant huge increases in expense and waste -- and, not far beyond that, where further increases in purity were not possible.

At some point, I suppose we're arguing about specific numbers, and I'm short on those. But I know that "100% purity" is off the table, and I know that you don't need a pure standard to determine a sample's purity.

 

Okay, looks like we've answered the question of whether the ancients could produce "pure gold". If we define "pure gold" as "the purest gold the ancients could produce", then the answer is "yes". I'm glad we got that cleared up.

Now, let's go back to the original poster's question, about how long .999 silver has been used. I've provided a link to an item stamped "999/1000" that appears to be from the mid-1800s; here's another link referring to a .999 coin produced in 1830. I've provided my reasons for believing that it probably wasn't produced much before 1800. Can anybody provide a reference indicating that it was?