Speaker 0 00:03 Welcome to brain junk. I'm Tracy <inaudible> and I am Amy Barton and this is a brainstorm. Are you ready to go down the exciting road of coins? Ooh, I was trying to think of some things with alliteration because I love it. Is it like a catchy coins? Is it a, are you a champion of change? Ooh, yeah. Awesome. I stumbled across a mental floss article is what got this started and it's from 2013 and they're announcing the 75th anniversary of the baseball hall of fame and how the U S mint was going to do a coin contest for a new $5 gold coin, a $1 and a half dollar. Ah, and so super fun. They do that from time to time. We've seen some beautiful commemorative coins that are out in circulation and the state coins, but this one in 2014 was going to be convex. So imagine a little bowl shaped coin cause it was baseball and they're like, let's do this cool coin.
Speaker 0 01:01 That's like a baseball on one side. As you know, you all are not carrying around little bull shaped coins in your pockets. Bent coin seems like a really bad idea. You couldn't imagine the wear on your jeans. It will look like you have little ringworm on your teeth and how are you going to put it in a vending machine? You will not. This is not spendable currency. And so all of these questions I had never thought about. How does a coin get there? What process does it go through? How do we decide what our coins are? Congress decides, Oh, takes an act of Congress for any currency to be manufactured. Now I do think that the national baseball hall of fame coins did come out, but they were flat. Yeah. For all those reasons, and it is interesting to think of all the contributing factors to those decisions.
Speaker 0 01:47 Like you could destabilize currency if you do a weird wrong thing or you try some crazy catchy thing and then you don't have spendable currency and you've put a lot of money into it. Or there's actually, I'll post the link on the website. You can go to the U S mint.gov and learn more about all the legislation around coins and they've got all the years listed. So you can click a year and find out what coin related legislation happened and Oh, I never thought about that. That sounds kind of dry, but I'm still curious. It's dry, but interesting in the way that like the U S government's ratio of how much animal parts can go, like how many bug parts can go into food products. Also. Interesting. But I'm probably not visiting that site, but I'm glad to know it exists that someone's looking out for you. Yeah. I found some other fun coin facts in my search.
Speaker 0 02:37 Did you know that Martha Washington is fabled to have donated her silverware to make the nation's first currency? So if you eat your hands on an original U S coin, you might have Martha Washington silverware. Okay. And did you know there were copper pennies and white cents? They didn't look like pennies, but there a white cent? Yeah. Were they using, what kind of, were they using a metal that looked white? Yeah, they were 12 parts. Nicole and 88 parts copper and it gave them a light or white color. And those are from the 1850s so if you have a white scent that's quite rare, I would think. Wow. Queens are pickled before they're minted, no vinegar. But they do go through a pickling process. So the copper nickel blanks are soaked in a special chemical solution. It washes and polishes those blanks and makes them ready for the final process.
Speaker 0 03:30 Wow. Another fun fact, there are no pennies in U S coinage. And this is a pedantic phrasing thing. The coin represents one, 100 of the U S dollar. It is a cent, not a penny. A penny doesn't exist as far as us mint.gov you'll see the word on there. But if you're looking at official records, it would be called a cent, not a penny. Ah. Now, and I have heard like if you rolled up to a bank with a wheelbarrow full of pennies, that the idea is that they would not have to accept it because they aren't, because pennies are not currency. Really. Yeah. But it's, it's a scent, right? So it's just, I think somebody was just playing on the whole idea of if you said, I have a handful of pennies that a bank could be like, Oh, I don't have to take that. Yeah, because like you just roll it, right?
Speaker 0 04:17 Oh yeah. No. They know they have machines. Yes. I love the machine. It's like you're gambling except not. Yeah, it's very fun. It seems persnickety for the employees, but I enjoy it very much. Last fact, you know how much? $1 million ways. I have no idea. $1 million actually coins. This is deviating what? I just thought it was super fun. If you had $1 bills, it would weight 2040 pounds. If you had $100 bills, it would only be 20 pounds. Oh, you're going to seek around some ask for twenties or one hundreds. You don't have a truck. You want to be able to get away clean. Ask for hundreds. So wait, and that was how much? How much money in hundreds. $1 million. $1 million in hundreds. If you use $1 bills, it would be a ton. All right. Random quotes, bring me a shoe box full of 20s and it won't be very heavy, right?
Speaker 0 05:09 Shoe box, full shoe box full of hundreds. Oh yeah, it'd be a millionaire. That would be great. Yes. Yay. So if you want to send us a shoe box full of money, where would you send a trace? Well, you would send it to you. Message us about an address. Yeah. Well you could email
[email protected] we're also on Facebook and Instagram as brain junk podcast, and you can find us on Twitter as at my brain junk. Amy and I will catch you next time, especially if you have that shoe box full of 20s when we share more of everything you never knew you wanted to know. And I guarantee you will not be bored.
