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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;superc, post: 1624411, member: 44079&quot;]Decades ago when Susan B Anthony dollars were new, I drove a yellow taxi at night in NYC.&nbsp; As a cab driver I hated the Susan B with a passion ( wasn&#039;t alone in this).&nbsp; Often the cabs I was given to drive did not have working interior lighting.&nbsp; I was personally responsible for turning in the amount on the meter every morning.&nbsp; It was also part of my job to give passengers their correct change.&nbsp; Too often passengers sometimes paid with Susan B.s.&nbsp; The problem began when the next passenger would be due 70 or 90 cents in change,&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The goof was usually not discovered until I returned to the garage and had to turn in my night&#039;s receipts.&nbsp; A dollar was a lot more in those days.&nbsp; (The minimum wage was about $1.55).&nbsp; Discovering the error usually hurt my wallet.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Lots of folks who handled cash for a living hated that coin and we didn&#039;t miss it when it died.</p><p><br /></p><p>That brings me to a peculiarity in American coin history.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I refer to the nickel and the silver half dime.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I can easily envision a customer or a shop keeper mistaking a dime for a half dime or vice versa.&nbsp; I strongly suspect that when the half dime died, lots of folks were happy and preferred the larger nickel coin.</p><p><br /></p><p>Here is my question. Nickels go back to 1866.&nbsp; Why then did we continue making the half dime until 1873?&nbsp; Why was it still being made in 1867 if it&#039;s value was the same as that of the nickel?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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