Regarding holograms, some years ago Whitman Publishing was investigating a program of holograms for coin grading, etc., and Ken Bressett sent me a bunch of images.

When Whitman first looked into the possibility it sounded like a great idea and I was all for it. I even supplied some of the coins for testing the quality and practicality. I was not working at the Whitman office and not directly involved with such projects at the time, so saw little of what was going on. Edward Metzger was in charge of product development and handled the project that took a couple of years to develop. I think the first product was ready for market in 1992, and sold for $27.50.

I remember seeing early attempts at producing sheets of holograms for Morgan and Peace dollars. I think that $20 gold coins were also in the works, but don’t know if production sheets were ever finished. These were mounted on cards with images and descriptions of each denomination in six grades from MS-65 to EF-45. The actual work was done by Polaroid’s hologram division in Massachusetts.

Apparently the experiment was not successful. The images were a deep green color which made the coins look unnatural. Under magnification the coins were clear and well defined, but the cards were awkward and hard to use for comparison with a coin to be graded. As far as I know production was aborted shortly after the initial release.