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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Conder101, post: 280735, member: 66&quot;]Years ago it was believed that in order for a coin to be accepted it had to contain its full face value in metal.&nbsp; The cent, being made of copper which was much less valuable than silver, was considerably larger than the dime.&nbsp; In the 1860&#039;s the government realized that at least for the minor coinage they did not have to contain their full value because they were merely tokens for the convenience of making change and they would circulate anyway.&nbsp; So the cent was made much smaller than it was before.&nbsp; It still contained about half of its face value in metal and that still left it slightly larger than the silver dime.&nbsp; In 1865 the new five cent piece had about two and a half cents worth of metal in it and it was also considerably larger than the silver dime.</p><p><br /></p><p>In 1964 silver reached the point where the metal in the dime was now worth more than the face value of the coin.&nbsp; So they had two choices, make the dime even smaller, or change the material it was made of.&nbsp; They decided to change the metal.&nbsp; Now when they did that they could have put more metal into the coin to make it close to the face value which would have made a larger coin, but by this time vending machines were a large part of American life and it would have created a great deal of confusion to have two coins of the same value but widely different sizes circulating and to try and get the machines to recognize and accept both of them.&nbsp; (They had enough problems just trying to get them to accept the two different compositions with the same size.)&nbsp; Also the government was trying to convince the public that there was no reason to hoard the silver coins because they would &quot;stay in circulation side by side with the new clad coins for many years to come.&quot;&nbsp; This would be much harder to put over if the two coins were greatly different in size.&nbsp; So they went the simple route and kept the dime the same size it had been since 1828.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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