Reply to Thread

Message:: [QUOTE="Conder101, post: 25548770, member: 66"]At the time the scale was created (and remember it was a PRICING scale not a grading scale)  that premise was correct and it had been correct for some years.  The problem was during the 1950's interest in large cent collecting increased and as more people came into the field it put and much greater demand on the higher grades than on the lower one so the original ratios no longer worked.  The early copper community kept trying to adjust the BS-1 values and  patching on rule exceptions to try to keep the pricing system working but eventually in the early 1970's the copper community dumped the whole system as unworkable.  Then just a few years later the ANA adopted the pricing system numbers and applied them to the grading scale. Because no one really used it other than the early copper collectors and Paramount before the ANA adopted it for their official grading guide in 1977. (by which time bothe the early copper and Paramount had discarded it.  And the ANA guide only used 3 grades of Mint State 60, 65, and 70 with 70 being basically a "theoretical" grade that would never be encountered in real life.  In the early 80's they added 63 and 67.  In the mid 80's they were pushing to add 64.  Then in 1986 PCGS came out with th plan to use all 11 MS grades.  (Even so for about the first 5 years or so you still never saw anything graded higher than a 67, and those were rarely seen.)[/QUOTE]