Where did all the Copper come from ??

I believe archeologists have found evidence of numerous ancient smelting sites along the Mississippi River. It is speculated that a few thousand years ago near Poverty Point, Mississippi copper may have been smelted into slabs for transport by sea to "who knows where."

 

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I don't think that is Morenci, doesn't look big enough to me.

 

Even Dr. Freidus could not prove me wrong. They simply did not have the equipment, money & technology to produce finished planchets. Its basically water removing equipment during mining copper ore which is also a major deterrent. Ores could be finished and impurities removed and even partly smelted but the finished planchets were produced in England. In my research for the book Forgotten Coins and the debate at the time with XRF, trace metal analysis and provenance which we know know is helpful but no substitute for Isotopic Analysis when tracking coins to ore these facts came to light. Ingots were imported back or finished flans but the documentation seems virtually absent in this regard also but it can be no other cycle of ore to flan other than via England during this period and this includes the Confederation State Coinage also such as Massachusetts, NJ, Vermonts and Connecticuts. John Lorenzo

 

I have seen one or two papers on this idea. The first copper smelted was obviously the surface copper and these forms are generally called arsenic bearing copper due to crude smelting operations and their inability to remove As from the ore. JPL

 

If you read Dr. Sheldon, the copper in the earliest U.S. copper coins came from wherever the mint personnel could find it. That included old cooking utensils and any other source. While they were at it, the sources were not always pure so traces of other metals were in the coins too.

There was a time in the summer of 1793 when the quality of the copper used in the large cents and half cents was really bad. I've seen a lot of Sheldon 11 large cents that were similar to this piece with a darker area on the obverse. Sometimes you find piece with large laminations,




Sometime around 1796 or so, the mint started to important planchets from England that were made by Bolton and Watt. This continued until the War 1812 when England embargoed the shipments.

In the 1820s and '30s, the mint bought its planches from a firm in Massachusetts.

 

Thats a beauty early cents are one of my top.

 

Some pretty poor copper planchets used in 1793 and 1794 heads of '93 varieties. My 1793 S-16:

 

After the War of 1812 importation of copper planchets from Boulton & Watt resumed and continued into the 1830's.

 

True, but where did the copper for those old cooking utensils and other sources come from? There just wasn't enough domestic production to supply it so I suspect most of those "other sources" must have ultimately have come from imported copper.

 

Mathur etal.(2009b) demonstratedthat US cents from the nineteenth and twentieth centuryshifted from imported Cornwall ores and Michigan ores tothe use of highly variable porphyry copper deposits around1880. Silver-based coins dating from the fourth century BC until the eighteenth century AD were analyzed by Desaultyetal. (2011), and it was demonstrated that European silvercan be distinguished from Mexican and Andean sources by a combination of Pb, Ag, and Cu isotopes. Balliana et al.(2013) investigated Roman bronzes from Northern Spain for Sn and Cu isotopes. A few analyses were undertaken on cop- per artifacts from the Old Copper Culture and compared to the native copper occurrences in Michigan (Mathur et al. 2014).In terms of wider usage of Cu isotopes in archaeometry, tur-quoise(Hulletal.2008)andglass(Loboetal.2014)werealsoanalyzed for their Cu isotopes to test the applicability for provenancing these materials.To sum up, the Pb isotope signature is specific for theidentification to deposits, while the Cu isotope signature isspecific to the identification of ore mineral sources withinthe deposit. In the ideal case, the combination of Pb and Cuisotopes from an artifact would not only provide informationabout the provenance but also about the type of ore used inancient times. Thus, conclusions can be made about the depthofthe miningactivitiesinancient times,evenifall tracesweredestroyed by later mining activities. The shift from colorfuloxidizedoresnearthesurfacetosulfidicoresatagreaterdepthof the same deposit would have required substantial developments in winning methods, e.g., hauling, mine draining, and timbering to support deeperadits. In addition,the extractionof copper from sulfidic ores, especially chalcopyrite, in comparison to oxidized ores requires advancements in the techniques of smelting. Preceding roasting of the ores can be postulated.Thus, the use of sulfidic ores is linked with changes in thetechniques of exploitation and smelting, resulting in the fact that the identification of ore types used in prehistoric times is of substantial interest.

Mathur R, Titley S, Hart G, Wilson M, Davignon M, Zlatos C (2009b)The history of the United States cent revealed through copper iso-tope fractionation. J Archaeol Sci 36:430
–
433. doi:10.1016/j. jas.2008.09.029

 

This Mathur paper is interesting - Mathur KNEW before hand the copper sources were DIFFERENT based on U.S. Mint historical records. Records exist for this time period in the mid-1800's or so as we transitioned from English to American copper sources. No records EXIST for the 18thC for U.S. Colonials but its logical to assume if we were using Cornish copper up to the mid-19thC for copper cents it was a primary source before this time. Simsbury was an exception since the Cu PURITY of this mine was WORLD RENOWNED for its purity so it was worth exporting/refining and then returning this Cu back to the Colonies. Back to the paper - Since he knew the sources were already different he just verified this with Cu isotopic analysis just to get a benchmark data set for these copper sources which did show DIFFERENT Cu isotopic fractionations. Its the beginning ... as more data is gathered/compared/stockpiled almost all copper pieces will have confirmed or almost confirmed provenances in the future for U.S. coinage. It will just take decades ... not years. JPL

 

i saw it from the outside, never went in..

 

nothing to do with coins, but up in kent, ct, near the covered bridge (bull's bridge) are iron smelters where they made the iron for the chains that went across the harbour in nyc to blocade the british in rev,. war, and down the road from me house (perhaps 4 miles) is roxbury mines, iron from their went to build the monitor in civil war, i expolred some caves there back in the day (all blocked off now due to sinkholes) and even have found some iron artifacts from days of yore...

 

My middle son graduated from there as well between service tours of Afghanistan. Tour 1. Corporal, Tour 2. Sargent, Michigan Tech Honors in Engineering, Tour 3. Lieutenant, Stateside. Captain.

Now he's at Texas A&M going for a PHD.

From the information I can glean up through 1807, the original attempts using scrap copper did not work well and they began purchasing copper blanks from suppliers in England when possible. The advantage there was they didn't have to be rolled out into blanks which was a chore for the early mint. There was an inordinate amount of lamination and cutting problems using the scrap copper in the early days of the mint.

 

My middle son graduated from there as well between service tours of Afghanistan. Tour 1. Corporal, Tour 2. Sargent, Michigan Tech Honors in Engineering, Tour 3. Lieutenant, Stateside. Captain.

Now he's at Texas A&M going for a PHD.

He and my oldest son are switching from Captain (Fire Dept.)- Captain (Army) to Doctor (Medical) - Doctor (PHD).

 

All the copper came from supernova explosions before the earth was formed.

 

And they think the WHOLE UNIVERSE sprang from NOTHING. It takes a super 'educated' person to ignore the evidence in front of them.

"Nothing comes from nothing Nothing ever could" is so obvious that it even made it into the lyrics of a popular song.

Hence, EDUCATED IDIOTS. I'm obviously not opposed to education, but you don't have to become an IDIOT to get an education.

All we really know is that they got the copper from copper deposits somewhere within reach. And at some point, it became useful to create an image on them and use them for money.

And this is why we're here.

 

The theory that the universe began as a singularity doesn't mean that it was "nothing." The greatest minds have studied this for almost 100 years and I wouldn't call them idiots. The Webb telescope will hopefully give us even more data than we already have about it.

 

This is my S-18b which appears to be on the detestable Gourdon Scrap Copper (used on S-17s and S-18As rather the finer Taylor and Bailey copper usually found on S-18B. Pages 89-90 of Breen has a nice backstory on this.

 

I'm not impressed by "great minds" that can't see what's in front of their noses. But let's get back to COINS.