I've noticed that 72% is a rather common percentage. Why this rather odd number instead of something that is a round number? What's wrong with 70%? Obligatory .720 coin picture.
It would probably take a volume to tell the whole story. But politics, silver prices, availability, economic factors have changed the ratios many times over history.
Also, the Silver Standard was a monetary system, in which the standard economic unit of account was a fixed rate of silver.
If you are real good at math, 7 or 8 girls will sit real close to you every morning before class trying to get some help with homework.
If you are super-good with math, when you get older, no girls will ever want to be close to you as you'll be considered a NERD!!!
My wife just came in from the other room saying "the weirdest thing just happened, I was just in here looking at some spectrograms from my flute practice and my eyes started rolling for no reason..."
Women who collect silver trimes or even know about silver trimes must be 0.001% of the female dating population.
I never really noticed 720 was all that popular. Certainly it was in Mexico. Perhaps it's that if you take 900 silver and toss in 1/ 4th its weight in copper you get 720. People prefer working with even numbers.
Then there's sterling...92.5% AND 83.5%. I've always wondered about how they settled on it too. Nice informative post!
Throughout history the fineness of any given coin, regardless of the metal, was chosen by the ruling authority at the time to determine the amount of seigniorage they needed and or wanted at that particular time. Seigniorage was one of their primary sources of income. So depending on the situation at the time, they would drop the metal fineness to increase the seigniorage. As to the particular number, or how much more to drop it, various factors always played into determining that. They had to be concerned about their own populace as well as other countries being willing to accept the new coinage because of trade as that could have a great impact on their own economy. So usually they wouldn't drop it too much from what the previous coinage was. To help understand the situation at the time, look at what the previous fineness was, as well as the historical situation at the time the drop was made. Once we do this, things can often make a whole lot more sense to us.
Fineness or weight has also been adjusted in fruitless attempts to legislate the Gold/Silver ratio. US changes to silver coin weight in 1853 and 1874... The US trime of 1851-1853 was partly an attempt to normalize below value minor coins. 0.8g of 0.750 fine, vs 1854 and later 0.75g of 0.900 fine. If you look at the data with a belief that the rulers of the time thought they could pull the wool over the eyes of the sheep, that's about half. The other half is out & out theft, e.g. the debasement of the colonial Spanish silver was just the locals ripping off the King. Hang a few, cancel their commissions to mint for the crown and resell the commissions to new thieves solved that for a while.
Well, most these girls ended up being varsity cheerleaders. And I ended up in big trouble when I skipped school and took the entire squad on a joy-ride to another county. We got in an accident that totaled the car. But, no body was hurt.
Well if it had been me I would've just looked for a Mexican Revolutionary Parral Peso of Poncho Villa and forgotten the girls... Back on the .720 theme. The era of gradual debasement of silver in LAtin America in the 1800's was called the Moneda Feble era. It lasted from 1830 until around 1852 and severely damaged the economies of several nations in northern Latin America for decades. Here the target was to make coins of .666 fine but this opened the door to counterfeiting those pieces to bad pieces made from pure copper. The .720 issues in Mexico seem an attempt to keep some silver in circulation as I recall even the famous Mexican Pesos of the 1960's having .100 fine silver. I think Ecuadorian 5 sucres during the 40's were also .720 fine. Nearly the same date as your Mexican coin tho. I wonder if the alloy came from similar sources? -- from NGC coin facts, you can see the 0.720 on the reverse.
