What is the highest silver loss on barber half dollars you seen?

wood_ster
Yes salt, sun, sand and water can really eat away that metal.
Still a nice find for MD.

 

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I'm a chemist, and if I just give a result I can get sued in court. It's called showing your work. I like to see before and after. Just throwing out a number looks like you're throwing out a number.
If I saw the weight on a balance (a calibrated balance) of a new AGE and the circulated one I could figure it out with my calculator.
I am not in the habit of believing everything I see on the internet, thank God.

 

Of course. And I'm sure in your lab notebooks you record not just reagent weights, but also scale details and calibration records, because it's your professional obligation, right? And if you're publishing, you'd better faithfully report not only measurements but uncertainties/tolerances.

By this standard, you are of course free to ignore Doug's claim. In fact, if you found yourself as a referee on a paper where he published it, I'd expect you to recommend rejecting the paper.

But even if Doug had included details about the scale he used, his calibration procedure, the coin's initial weight, and the coin's final weight, he could still have made it all up.

The (ahem) gold standard of scientific investigation is that the result should be repeatable. So if you have doubts about Doug's claim, get some coins, weigh them, and start carrying them around!

 

I believe the Mint itself might be the best resource on this matter. This is from the 1902 Mint Director's annual report. They had been studying this exact issue, collecting old worn coinage from circulation and weighing them to see how much loss there was. What you see is coins that were a bit old and worn tended to loose about 4-6% of their weight (sometimes more, sometimes less).