Posts tagged 'steam press'

Over the past 230 years, the US Mint has vastly improved its methods of producing coins. But even the technology from 1790 was vastly different from the earliest days of coin manufacturing. Early civilizations, like the Ancient Greeks and China during the Qin Dynasty, struck coins using methods that are no longer used today for circulating currency.

While the production of American coinage today is entirely mechanical, the U.S. Mint once relied solely on manpower to strike early coins. Today, a single modern press at the Philadelphia Mint can strike a staggering 720 coins per minute, but production wasn’t always this fast. Nearly 200 years ago, the United States Mint began a modernization process by implementing the first steam press used to strike an American coin.