Decades ago when Susan B Anthony dollars were new, I drove a yellow taxi at night in NYC. As a cab driver I hated the Susan B with a passion ( wasn't alone in this). Often the cabs I was given to drive did not have working interior lighting. I was personally responsible for turning in the amount on the meter every morning. It was also part of my job to give passengers their correct change. Too often passengers sometimes paid with Susan B.s. The problem began when the next passenger would be due 70 or 90 cents in change, On many occasions in the dark because of size and feel similarity a Susan B was given back with me believing I had given the passenger a quarter. The goof was usually not discovered until I returned to the garage and had to turn in my night's receipts. A dollar was a lot more in those days. (The minimum wage was about $1.55). Discovering the error usually hurt my wallet. Sometimes the customer is who made the mistake, but that was a lot rarer and I always told them if I caught it in time. Lots of folks who handled cash for a living hated that coin and we didn't miss it when it died. That brings me to a peculiarity in American coin history. We seem to have had a 7 year or so era in which we had two totally different coins of different size, but with the same face value. I refer to the nickel and the silver half dime. Handling one of those half dimes and comparing it to the dimes of the time I am convinced it was the Susan B or the mid and late 1800s. I can easily envision a customer or a shop keeper mistaking a dime for a half dime or vice versa. I strongly suspect that when the half dime died, lots of folks were happy and preferred the larger nickel coin. Here is my question. Nickels go back to 1866. Why then did we continue making the half dime until 1873? Why was it still being made in 1867 if it's value was the same as that of the nickel?
Yeah, I found the SBA's felt like a quarter in your hand. Just another reason for its being sooo unpopular. Now at least the Sac's are a different color. As for making nickels and half dimes at the same time, I suspect politics of some kind involved.
The nickel didn't really catch on right away, but did in time. During that immediate time during the end of the Civil War and into the 1870s coinage had been hoarded by the populace because of fears of the paper money losing it's value. Silver and gold coin traded at much more favourable rates during the war than the Legal Tender and National Bank issues. The half dime saw a diminishing mintage after the war, and likely many of them spent a good amount of time in vaults somewhere for awhile because they were silver. The shield nickels did circulate, and given how many of them are heavily worn - they circulated hard and long - probably into the very early 20th century. Years ago we had an older member of a coin club that remembered as a child during the 1930s his father getting half dime in payment for a dime at a service station and feeling like he was ripped off because it was worth half of what it should have been but it wasn't that much smaller than a dime. Seated liberty coins did indeed circulate into the 1930s in some areas.
During that time right after the war the US mint was messing around with lots of patterns, but one idea that came up as a solution to the silver dime problem was to make a cupro-nickel ten cent coin to replace the dime along the lines of what happened with the nickel replacing the half dime. So they apparently minted about 24 examples of this: Which is struck in 75% copper, 25% nickel just as the nickel was. They used the hubs from old Large cents, which then transpired into a few examples being struck in copper with the One Cent reverse from the large cents - I have yet to add one of those to my motley hoard but want a real 1868 Large Cent.
Hi Scottish. Yes, I know they circulated into the 1920s because I remember my father telling me how as a kid just after WWI he got ripped off when someone gave him change from a quarter and a half dime coin was given him instead of a dime and wow was his mom (my grandmother of course) mad when he came back from the store and gave her the change from what she had sent him out to buy. That was kind of like losing a few dollars in mean wages today as far as a nickel's purchasing power in 1919 or so.
I'm not aware of the shield nickel ever being unpopular because of its size. The design wasn't really a hit. The three cent nickel and the shield nickel were really considered to be "temporary" coins at the time they were introduced. This was the era of hard money and it was believed at the time that coins should have close to their full intrinsic value in them in the metal value. the problem was the hoarding of precious metals was still going on. The metal in the three cent silver and the half dime was worth more than the face value of the coin. this lead to a critical shortage of coins for commerce. The answer was the introduction of the bronze cent, and two cent, followed by the coppernickel three and five cent pieces. These were true subsidiary coins with metal value well below their face value. The intent was that these coin, at least the three and five cent pieces, would be made until the value of the precious metals settled themselves out and then the silver versions of these coins would return to general use and the base metal coins would be discontinued. After all the authorities thought the public would object to these base metal tokens and would prefer the silver coins. Instead the larger easier to handle coins were readily accepted and the public really didn't want to go back to those tiny hard to handle and easy to lose little silver pieces. So instead of the coppernickel coins being "temporary", they became the permanent coins and the trime and half dime were legislated out of existence in 1873. Why were both kinds made at the same time? Probably because since they planned to eventually return to them the trime and half dime were still on the books as production coins and a small number were made each year just to "keep the promise alive" that someday they would return to regular production.
