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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Conder101, post: 1327168, member: 66&quot;]There was a major coin shortage in the country in the early 60&#039;s.&nbsp; The government blamed coin collectors and the idea was that if there were no mintmarks we would be less likely to hoard the coins.&nbsp; So legislation was passed to remove the mintmarks for a period of five years.&nbsp; (They restored the mintmarks after only three years though.)&nbsp; The proofs and mint sets were also a casualty of the coin shortage with both being discontinued and replaced with a the Special Mint Set&nbsp; whose coins were kind of &quot;halfway&quot; between business strikes and proofs.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;m going to keep this answer with US coins.&nbsp; With Non-US the answers are different. There is some debate about that.&nbsp; The first generally accepted proofs are some one cent pieces from 1817.&nbsp; There are some earlier coins which appear to have possibly been made as special presentation pieces.&nbsp; It is not unusual for these early coins to not have an appearance that we would associate with proof coins today.&nbsp; They were not always fully struck, sometimes they were not made with new dies.&nbsp; Although the dies were polished they may or may not have mirrored surfaces.&nbsp; Before 1858 if you wanted proof coins you kind of had to know someone in order to get them.&nbsp; Proof coins were not sold to the general public until 1858.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I really don&#039;t know.&nbsp; My guess would be it was an influence from the outside artists that were designing so many of the coins in the 1907 to 1921 period.&nbsp; Many of these artists had received much of their training in Europe, and to a large part they were all closely tied together by working with each other and many of them worked under or had indirect ties to Augustus Saint-Gaudens.&nbsp; I would look at European proofs and medals of the late 19th century to see what their finishes were like because there is a good chance that was where the influence would have come from.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>San Francisco had been pressed back into service after being mothballed to help with the coin shortage of the 1960&#039;s.&nbsp; After the shortage was over the Philadelphia mint and Denver could once again probably handle the load.&nbsp; But it was more likely they could if they were not also having to restart the collectors coins program.&nbsp; So the Proof coinage was moved from Philadelphia where they needed to make coins, to San Francisco which was no longer needed for coins except cents but would otherwise once again be mothballed.&nbsp; This turned out to be a good thing because later it was once again pressed into service for striking coins&nbsp; (cents and quarters with no mintmark)</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Typically it was because of changes in the relative values between gold and silver.&nbsp; If gold was common silver was relatively worth more and the silver in the coins were was worth more than the face value and the coins would not circulate.&nbsp; So the weight and/or size would be reduced.&nbsp; In 1873 so much silver had been coming out of western mines that silver was falling in value and theweight of the coins was increased.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>OK this is my personal opinion on the gold.&nbsp; The country was in the Great Depression and the government was going to be spending a ton of money to try and stimulate the economy.&nbsp; But where would this money come from?&nbsp; Yes, they could do some borrowing, but this was still the era when it was believed that money needed to have some kind of backing.&nbsp; So they needed more gold.&nbsp; By calling in the gold they could get it for a simple exchange of paper.&nbsp; No net cost.&nbsp; Then once they had it they raised the official value.&nbsp; This would allow them to issue almost twice as much money for the same amount of gold.&nbsp; They also adopted a fractional reserve backing plan.&nbsp; Now instead of&nbsp; having to have a dollars worth of gold for each dollar in new money, they only needed 25 cents worth of gold.&nbsp; This resulted in an eightfold increase in the amount of money they could issue.</p><p><br /></p><p>As for the silver coins, the market value of silver had been rising and in 1963 it passed to point where the metal in the coins was worth more than the face value ($1.2929 per oz)&nbsp; Now they could have just reduced the weight of the coins but that would just be a stop gap and there did not appear to be any reason that the silver price was going to stop rising.&nbsp; That would mean continuing to reduce the weight again and again.&nbsp; Instead they threw in the towel and just removed the silver completely.&nbsp; Silver was left in the half dollar at a reduced amount as a sop to the silver producing states in order to get their votes in congress to approve the clad coinage.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Same as with the silver in 1964.&nbsp; Copper had risen to the point where they were worth more as metal than as money.&nbsp; The government was losing money on every coin they made.&nbsp; Back then they saw that happening and they changed the size and alloy to restore a health seigniorage profit.&nbsp; Today we just continue making more of the coins and losing money on them year after year.&nbsp; So far for at least six years.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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