Why is there a star between LIBERTY and the date on Jefferson nickels? I only figured that out when searching rolls of nickels yesterday. Is it just a mark to separate the two letters, or is it to fill in space? jcakcoin
How are you going to close a thread? What if they respond, but they respond to the question, "What are the first 20 digits of Pi?" It is an interesting question, and I think we might have to chalk it up to designer's artistic sensibilities. I would be interested in knowing if their was a known symbolic reason for it.
Yep, just artistic license. Some desigers like to use separators in their legends and some don't. (Saint-Gaudens was really BIG on the use of separators. The models for his gold coins had lots of them but most if not all were removed before the final approval.) Often they use dots, sometimes stars, sometimes other figures. For an example of dots look at the back of the current dime. The Mercury dime used stars for separators on the reverse. I believe one of the classic commems used crossed pickaxes. One interesting feature of that star is that it is small, except in 1957 when they used a much larger star. And then returned to the small star in 1958. Another interesting thing is that the use of stars used to be quite common on our coinage, but that star on the nickel is about the only star used on out regular circulating coinage since 1946. (There are stars on the walking half and the Kennedy half, and on the Ike and SBA dollars but they don't circulate that much.) On the cent through quarter the only stars since 1946 are on the nickel, the bicentennial quarter, and a few of the State quarters. Another star fact. Until 1892 all the stars used on the circulation coins were six pointed stars. On the quarter and half Barber used six pointed stars on the obverse, and five pointed stars on the reverse. Since then I believe the only use of six pointed stars on our coins was on the gold coins of Saint-Gaudens. All the other stars have been five pointed.
Yes but that coin was designed in 1878, years before the change was made to five pointed stars. They simply kept the old design. They didn't change the design of the Liberty head nickel or the gold coins that had been designed before 1892 either. I suppose I should have said that since 1892 no newly designed coin has used six pointed stars.
