Those presses have been retired. They now use horizontal stroke singe die Schuler presses that run at 750 cycles per minute.
The mint must have a lot of presses to stamp out the billions and billions of coins it does each year. Any one know offhand how many people employed in all the mints?
Ours or in China. I hope you realize our government has now outsourced our coin production to China since they already have all those machines that make out coins anyway.
"2009 American Silver Eagle Values" is the title of an article published on Coin News within the last couple of days. It even has a graph to illustrate the tracking that was done on this coin being sold on ebay. According to the article and the graph illustration the MS70 Early Release must certainly be important to a lot of collectors due to the premium they sell for. I don't own many slabbed coins period, many I have purchased over the years I broke out of their slab, never owned a "First Strike" or "Early Release", but if it is important enough for some to pay that extra premium then go for it. The TV coin shows certainly like to emphasis this "pedigree" as they call it.
As with the smooth edged dollars, the lot number and shipping destination can mean something about the coins within, but there are first strikes and last strikes in every bag they produce.