Sunday, March 30, 2025

“Money Talks” of the American Numismatic Association

As a longtime admirer of the works of Ayn Rand, I hold money in high regard. The origin of money is in ritual gift exchange, rather than in economic calculation, which came tens of thousands of years of later. That being so, it remains that periodic innovations in economic calculation caused quantum leaps in prosperity and general welfare. People are unlikely to kill or die for what they can sell or buy. 

But I never joined any organizations for numismatics until after 1992. For one thing, I was never a serious collector and still am not. I attended a couple of lectures by Clifford Mishler, then the president of Krause Corporation, publishers of hobby periodicals and books, and later president of the American Numismatic Association. He said that all collectors, whether of coins, stamps, automobiles, vinyl recordings, wine or anything else, share four passions: Completeness, Condition, Rarity, and Value. Those are not my concerns. If I have one of something, regardless of its condition or value, I have an artifact about which there is a story to be told. Coins in particular are the often the most common artifact of any society. You have to be a serious collector to find a truly rare coin. 

 

In 1992, I started hearing the ANA “Money Talks” radio program in the mornings as I was waking up to get ready for work. The ANA says: 

In 1992, “Money Talks,” a radio program on the history and lore of money, began broadcasting across the country on several local radio stations. The “Money Talks” broadcasts were typically 2-4 minutes long and consisted of coin stories that were recorded to educate and encourage interest in the hobby of numismatics.

 

I submitted about 20 scripts, and about half of them were produced for broadcast. The ANA granted me a literary award for a couple of them. 

https://www.money.org/money-talks-radio-archive/



I went on to write more full-length features about Peace Dollars, Large Cents, and other products of U.S. Mint. I also edited a monthly column, Internet Connections, which spotlighted safe and informative websites for collectors, typically, national mints or museums, specialty clubs, and sometimes the websites of dealers who were serious researchers.  

 

 https://archive.org/details/bestofanamtpart1

https://archive.org/details/bestofanamtpart2



The ANA rebranded “Money Talks” as a series of lectures at the semi-annual conventions, and many of them have been recorded and placed in video archives such as YouTube. 

Pay Warrants of the Texian Navy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWGzivjlOUI

The Texas Navy on NecessaryFacts 

Mutiny Aboard the San Antonio  



IRELAND'S POET LAUREATE by Michael Marotta 

 

"Our coins must pitch and spin to please the gambler, and pack into rolls to please the banker." Those were the words of Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats. Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923 and was regarded as the greatest poet of his time. He was also in charge of the committee that designed Ireland's coins.

 

Yeats was born in Dublin on June 13, 1865. At that time Ireland was completely under the control of England. While working in England, Yeats joined other Irish patriots who eventually won independence for the Emerald Isle. A world-renown playwright and poet, Yeats was elected to the Irish Senate. He chaired the committee that chose the designs for the coins of the new Irish Free State.


Yeats had seen classical Greek coins while studying and writing in Italy during the late 1800s. He arranged for all of the artists on this project to receive ancient Hellenistic coins, so they could see for themselves the powerful images he wanted to bring to Ireland's coins.

 

For over seventy years, Ireland's coins changed little from the winning designs of Percy Metcalf, a young sculptor recommended by the British School in Rome and selected by Yeats' committee. The horse, bull, salmon, hound and other animals of Ireland's eight circulating coins were all joined by a common symbol of Ireland's poetic tradition: the Celtic harp.

 

William Yeats died on January 28, 1939, at the age of 73.

 

(Numismatist, historian, and jurist Theodor Mommsen, was granted a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902.)

 

A.N.A. MONEY TALKS Transcript No. 1400 

ANCIENT HEARTS by Michael E. Marotta 

Look around . . . heart symbols are everywhere on Valentine's Day. 

Maybe even on a coin. 

The first heart symbols that appeared on ancient coins were produced 2500 years ago in North Africa. 

The town of Cyrene was founded in the 7th century B.C. by Greeks. 

Their town was eventually destroyed, but it was near what today is the city of Benghazi, along the coast of Libya. 

The city enjoyed modest prosperity . . . until its inhabitants 

discovered the silphium plant. (The plant is extinct now, but its closest 

living relative is a key ingredient in Worcestershire sauce.) Silphium was 

used as an herb. Its stalk was edible. Its pungent sap was the basis for cough syrups, and gave food an interesting flavor. But the most important use for silphium was as a contraceptive. 

 

Modern research suggests that silphium actually worked, and because of this, it was in great demand. Attempts to cultivate it in Syria and Greece were unsuccessful. It only grew near Cyrene--and, starting in 500 B.C., it became a steady source of income for the townspeople. By Roman times, silphium had been harvested to extinction. 

Over the centuries, the silphium plant came to symbolize Cyrene. The plant appeared on the town's gold, silver and bronze coins, starting around 500 B.C. Often the entire plant was shown. But sometimes, only the seeds of the plant were depicted. The silphium's seeds were heart-shaped, and those heart-shaped seeds that appeared on Cyrene's coins eventually came to symbolize love--a symbol that's still with us today. 

 

Today's program was written by Michael Marotta. "Money Talks" is 

a production of the American Numismatic Association in Colorado Springs, 

America's coin club for over a century. Take a tour of ANA's virtual Money Museum on the Web at www.money.org.

  

Transcript No. 1329                              November 6, 1997

THE MYSTERY OF THE MINT       by Michael Marotta     

 

Imagine a world without coins.  It isn't easy.  Coins and paper money are basic to our civilization.  Yet someone had to invent coins, and the truth is that we just do not know why coins were invented.     

 

Coins first appeared about 2,600 years ago in the ancient country of Lydia, in what is today western Turkey.  But people in the Middle East had already been using gold, silver, copper and other common trade goods as money for thousands of years, going as far back as perhaps 8000 B.C.E.     

 

From our modern viewpoint, the advantages of coinage are obvious. But those advantages were not so obvious to ancient peoples. Today, there are several theories to explain the invention of coinage. Many people think that merchants invented coins by marking nuggets and ingots of precious metals.  The marks were promises of purity and value. 

 

Another theory is that coins were invented to serve temples. After all, ancient coins have gods and goddesses on them.  Temples amassed wealth from donations and the temples might have issued the coins as rewards for good behavior. 

 

However, some scholars today think that the first coins were given to the mercenary soldiers of Greek towns.  These coins may have been like military campaign medals -- badges of honor that may not have been intended to be spent as money.

 

Whatever the origins of coinage, the idea spread rapidly.  Within a hundred years, almost every Greek town from southern Russia to eastern Spain had its own mint.  Today, people collect ancient coins for their historic value and artistic beauty.     

 

This has been "Money Talks."  Today's program was written by Michael Marotta and underwritten by Whitman Coin Products, a division of GoldenBooks, quality coin supplies at affordable prices.  "Money Talks" is a copyrighted production of the American Numismatic Association, 818 N.Cascade Ave., Colorado Springs, CO 80903, 719/632-2646, ana@money.org,http://www.money.org.

 

 

ANA: MT: Use of Mintmarks                                    

Transcript No. 1648                                                      January 27, 1999

 

USE OF MINTMARKS  by Michael E. Marotta

 

    If you look closely at coins, you will find that some of them have small letters indicating the mint at which they were struck.  Mintmarks go back to ancient times.  They were used to prevent forgery as well as to honor the mintmaster.

 

    Mintmarks date to about the year 400 B.C.  At the time, Greek towns elected their moneyers or mintmasters to annual terms of office.  These men ometimes were the actual die cutters, but usually they were officials who oversaw the cutting of dies and striking of coins.

 

    The mintmaster might engrave his whole name on a die, or just the first letters of his name.  Sometimes he made a "monogram."  The purpose was twofold.  It allowed praise for the man who did the work and identified the person responsible in case the coinage later proved to be of short weight or impure alloy.

 

   When the Roman Empire stretched across three continents, it operated more than 20 different mints with over 50 different mintmarks for a period of 300 years.  We have identified the mintmarks of London in England; Constantinople in Turkey; and Alexandria in Egypt.

 

    Today most nations have only one mint.  Larger countries often assign letters of the alphabet to identify mint cities, starting with the nation's capital.  On French coins, for example, the letter "A" stands for Paris. An "A" on a German coin, on the other hand, usually means "Berlin."

 

    Some nations contract out the production of their coinage.  On some British and Canadian coins, for example, the letter "H" stands for the "Heaton" company.

 

    In the United States, the main mint at Philadelphia typically did not use the "P" mintmark until recent decades.  Today, most American coins have either a "P" for "Philadelphia" or "D" for "Denver."  Usually you will see an "S" for "San Francisco" or "W" for "West Point" only on special coins and proof sets.

 

    This has been "Money Talks."  Today's program was written by Michael Marotta and underwritten by Whitman Coin Products, a division of Golden Books, the right choice for coin collecting books and supplies. "Money Talks" is a copyrighted production of the American Numismatic Association, 818 N. Cascade Ave., Colorado Springs, CO 80903, 719/632-2646, ana@money.org, http://www.money.org.


PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Accounting for Civilization 

Debt: The Seed of Civilization 

Robert Leonard’s “Curious Currency” 


Numismatics; History as Market 

Money as Speech and Peacemaking 

The Future of Money 

Mere Gold is Not Enough: Hayek’s “Denationalization” 

Numismatics: The Standard of Proof in Economics 


Scripophily 

The Art of Finance 

Challenge Coins 

 

Not Conned by Seghal’s Coined 


My Numismatic Bibliography (Partial List) 


 

Tuesday, March 25, 2025

Check the Math

I took Sociology 304 Research Methods in the spring of 2007. The professor was Young S. Kim. We were assigned to review two research papers each week. In the first class meeting, Dr. Kim said that these were not to be summaries but must be criticisms. After class, I approached his desk and asked if undergraduates could competently criticize a peer-reviewed publication. He replied, “Check the math.”

 

I do not know that I found any mathematical errors because I only archived three of my assignments from that class and none of those identified any such problems. However, a few months ago, researching an article for the American Astronomical Society, I found this from 1948: 

  • “Evolution of the Universe” by Ralph A. Alpher and Robert Herman, Nature, No. 4124 ,Vol. 162, November 13, 1948 identified errors in 
  • “The Evolution of the Universe” by George Gamow, Nature, No. 4122, Vol. 162, October 30, 1948. 

(At that time, Alpher and Herman were doctoral candidates and Gamow was their advisor. Earlier that year, Physical Review published "The Origin of Chemical Elements" by Ralph Alpher, Hans Bethe, and George Gamow. Although he checked their math on a computer at the National Bureau of Standards, Robert Herman declined to belisted as "Delter." (Wikipedia citing Gamow here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher%E2%80%93Bethe%E2%80%93Gamow_paper )


 “The condensation-mass obtained from this corrected density comes out not much different from Gamow's original estimate. However, the intersectionpoint rmat. = rrad. occurs at t=8·6 x 1017 sec.  3 x 1010 years (that is, about ten times the present age of the universe). This indicates that, in findingthe intersection, one should not neglect the curvature term in the general equation of the expanding universe. In other words, the formation ofcondensations must have taken place when the expansion was becoming linear with time.”  

 


Interesting as that was to read, I was more impressed with the discovery that cosmologists in 1948 accepted an estimated age of the Universe at 3 billion (3*109) years. The simple truth is that estimates of the size and age of the universe have been expanding. 

It is also interesting that their work required the radius of the known universe to be proportional to  [the square root of (minus one)] light years. Imagine that!

 

For more on Young S. Kim see:

Kim, Y. S., Barak, G., & Shelton, D. E. (2009). Examining the “CSI-effect” in the cases of circumstantial evidence and eyewitness testimony: Multivariate and path analyses. Journal of Criminal Justice, 37(5), 452–460. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2009.07.005

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-15801-001

  

Previously on NecessaryFacts

 

Imaginary Numbers are Real; Pegasus is Not 

Two Books on Fermat’s Last Theorem 

Pi in the Sky over Austin

Elisha Loomis and the Pythagorean Proposition

 

Monday, March 24, 2025

Sigma Orionis

We think of Orion as a winter constellation because with shorter days it appears in the early evening sky. It is on the median at 9:00 PM on February 5, but even on April 21, it is just above the western horizon. In September, Orion rises above my eastern tree line by 5:00 AM, and before the Sun erases the night sky at 6:00 AM, it is high in the east. The group associated with Sigma Orionis just below the Belt of Orion consists of stars that are gravitationally bound as well as others that just happen to be there from our point of view.


SIGMA ORI (Sigma Orionis). Double stars are among the amateur's favorite targets, Albireo, Mizar always on the list. Multiples are better yet, and there are few more attractive than Sigma Orionis (which has no proper name), where you see a quartet of stars, the brightest of which is also a close double. Indeed, Sigma Ori, whose five stars together shine in Orion at bright fourth magnitude (3.66) just south of Alnitak in Orion's belt, is really at the pinnacle of a small star cluster that lies a somewhat-uncertain 1150 light years away. In turn, the stars and the cluster are a part of the Orion OB1 association, which includes many of the other stars in the constellation. Sigma's main component, "AB," dominates, the two a mere 0.25 seconds of arc apart shining at magnitudes 4.2 and 5.1. Both very young hydrogen-fusing dwarfs only a few million years old, the brighter is a magnificent blue class O (09.5) star, while the lesser is class B (B0.5). The pair orbit every 170 years at a distance of about 90 Astronomical Units. After correction for ultraviolet light from very hot (32,000 and 29,600 Kelvin) surfaces, they respectively radiate at a rate of 35,000 and 30,000 Suns. Temperature and luminosity give masses of 18 and 13.5 times that of the Sun, the sum of nearly 32 solar masses making the close AB pair among the most massive of visual binaries. Together they illuminate their surroundings, causing interstellar gas to glow. The next brightest stars in the system are Sigma Ori "D" and "E," bright seventh magnitude class B (B2) dwarf stars that at magnitudes 6.62 and 6.65 are nearly identical in brightness and have masses around 7 times that of the Sun. The similarity stops there. "E" is the prototype of the weird "helium-rich" stars that have strangely elevate abundances of helium. Even odder, the helium in "E" seems to be concentrated toward particular patches that involve a combination of the rotational and magnetic field axes. They may be related to cooler magnetic stars such as Cor Caroli, but no one really understands them. The last of Sigma's stars, "C," appears to be a normal ninth magnitude class A dwarf. In projection on the sky, "C" is the closest to the AB pair, and is at least 3900 AU away, while "D" and "E" lie at least 4600 and 15,000 AU distant. While the orbit of the AB pair is stable, the orbits of the other three are not, and long before they die they will probably be gravitationally sped up and forced out. "A" will explode first and may even kick "B" (which will explode next) out of the system. The other stars, wherever they wind up, will die as white dwarfs. The cluster seems also to contain numerous low-mass stars, brown dwarfs, that have masses only a few times that of Jupiter. -- http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/sigmaori.html


 

For early references to the open cluster, see, “On the supposed Variability of the closest Companion of σ Orionis” by W. R. Dawes, in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society for April 1860 (247 1860MNRAS..20..253W 1860/04 and “Correspondence - The Trapezium and σ in Orion” by D. A. Freeman, in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societyfor May 1860 (248  1860MNRAS..20..285D 1860/05). 

 

Drawn with PointPoint from a recorded observation

In 1776, Christian Mayer described σ Ori as a triple star, having seen components AB and E, and suspected another between the two. Component D was confirmed by FGW Struve who also added a fourth (C), published in 1876. In 1892 Sherburne Wesley Burnham reported that σ Ori A was itself a very close double, although a number of later observers failed to confirm it. In the second half of the twentieth century, the orbit o  σ Ori A/B was solved and at the time was one of the most massive binaries known.[22] -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma_Orionis

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Burnham’s Celestial Handbook 

The Andromeda Galaxy 

Asterisms 

What Color is the Orion Nebula?