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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;messydesk, post: 3222015, member: 1765&quot;]If you&#039;re interested in US coins, get Roger Burdette&#039;s book <i>From Mine to Mint</i>.&nbsp; This covers all the die making technologies that were adopted over time, including various reducing lathes, as well as coining machinery. </p><p><br /></p><p>Other countries had different timelines for adopting technologies that followed the end of the hammered coinage production that lasted 2 millennia. France had abandoned hammered coinage and adopted a press for milled coinage before Britain did in 1663.&nbsp; Milled coinage may have even started earlier, as there were trials of suitable presses the 1560s, but they weren&#039;t as fast, threatened mint workers&#039; jobs, and were made under the supervision of a Frenchman, Eloye Mestrelle.&nbsp; When milled coinage was scrapped for the first time, Mestrelle became a counterfeiter, which eventually bought him a death sentence.&nbsp; Seventy years later, Nicholas Briot, also French, tried to introduce milled coinage for Charles I, using a screw press for smaller coins and a rocker press for large ones, with the same results -- far superior coins, but a casualty of politics. Then came the British Civil War.&nbsp; Milled coins were brought back by Cromwell in 1656 via another Frenchman, Pierre Blondeau (Briot died in 1646), then were made exclusively starting in 1663.&nbsp; This is essentially the technology used by the early US mint.&nbsp; Additional modernization, like the steam press, which was first used in the US in 1836, was in use in Britain in 1810.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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