We received a few responses to the “how did this happen” that Richard Meaney wrote about last week. A raised, semi-circle area under and attached to Miss Liberty’s nose was seen on an 1837 capped bust half dime. Among the responses received so far:
- Perhaps some sort of a strike through?
- I am not a fan of nose piercing, but it is great to see you have started your next set of Capped Bust Half Dimes!
- This is a “back and forth” conversation:
o I think a telling item is that the reverse has the first A in AMERICA apparently falling apart which I assume is from die failure? So, something was happening or happened to the die. Maybe something broke off the die or some minting equipment and damaged the die such that the area under the nose became raised. It does look like a late die stage coin, even has the clash or deterioration marks under the left wing that is seldom seen. Nice mystery!
o Your thought of die damage is a good one, although I would have thought that more specimens would have turned up with the same issue but your analysis is sound. Maybe when the coiners saw the coins with this issue, they pulled the die given that it is a late die state. Realistically, there is no other possible explanation for a raised area on the coin except a die issue and the shape of this raised area would be initially suggestive of a piece of metal falling on the die late in this die marriages production. Only problem with this analysis is that this die was already hardened and tempered so a piece of metal falling on the die would be unlikely to produce an incused area in the die. And if an extemporaneous piece of metal fell on an annealed die, before it was hardened, the damage could have easily been lapped out, unless of course they didn’t see it. But as a late die state, clearly a large number of coins must have been struck from this die pair, so that doesn’t make a lot of sense. In reviewing all these scenarios, the only one that make cents, it that the die broke in that area towards the end of its life, just a weird shape for a die break, but I don’t have any other thoughts that make sense.
- I would need to see it in hand to determine what happened, though I am not sure even if I did see it in hand I would be able to come up with a reasonable scenario.
