THE MINT REMINISCENCES OF GEORGE ESCOL SELLERS

While recently revisiting From Mine to Mint, Roger Burdette's truly definitive and encyclopedic examination of the processes of the various US Mints during the 19th and early 20th centuries, I was once again reminded of Early Engineering Reminiscences (1815-40) of George Escol Sellers, edited by Eugene S. Ferguson.

Sellers, born in Philadelphia in 1808, was a very active engineer. He published his reminiscences of his career in a series of articles in American Machinist between 1884 and 1893. In 1965, Eugene Ferguson re-published the collected articles under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution (as Bulletin 238).

For numismatists, the heart of the book is the 18-page Chapter 9, which discusses Sellers' interactions with the Mint (among other things, he designed the steam engines for the branch mints in Charlotte and Dahlonega) and includes a number of very nice illustrations of mint machinery.

Taking the reminder to heart this time, I looked on bookfinder.com, where I saw a copy listed for $10 (delivered), which I couldn't resist.

I got it yesterday and was surprised to see that it's an inscribed copy: "To John W. Maxson, Jr. with my best thanks, Eugene S. Ferguson, Mar. 2, 1965" In his Preface, Mr. Ferguson thanks Mr. Maxson for having "responded with helpful answers to my unbidden queries."

A brief Google search reveals that Mr. Maxson provided a review of the book in the October 1965 issue of The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Mr. Maxson says, "This is a book with something for almost every historical reader, for it touches on an astonishingly broad range of subjects - the development of fire engines, screw-cutting lathes, U. S. Mint machinery, papermaking, railroads and locomotives, stationary steam engines, an early internal combustion engine, a fraudulent perpetual motion machine, an early electrical generator refinement, and an ingenious counterfeiter."

"[Mr. Ferguson] has taken great pains to explore the subjects and people discussed by Mr. Sellers in order to check details, explain now-obscure allusions, and bring in additional related information. By so doing, he has made this collection very complete and valuable. He has also managed, through diligent searching, to round out the book with a helpful and fascinating assortment of illustrations, many of them quite rare."

A man after my own heart, Mr. Maxson concludes his review with: "Even at four or five times the price, this would be a worthwhile addition to the library of any student of Pennsylvania history; at the Government Printing Office's price of $2.50, it is a bargain not to be missed."

While I did not find a biography of Mr. Maxson, from what I did find I infer that he was a historian of early American paper manufacturing (with five citations in the library of the American Philosophical Society) and a 1948 graduate of Amherst College who passed away in 2001.

I can now look forward to broadening my knowledge of the early Mint's machinery (and paper-making - without which there can be no currency - and, perhaps, counterfeiting), with Mr. Ferguson, Mr. Sellers and Mr. Maxson as my guides.

To read Eugene Ferguson's Wikipedia page, see: Eugene S. Ferguson (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_S._Ferguson)

To read about the Ferguson Prize awarded by the Society for the History of Technology, see: The Ferguson Prize (www.historyoftechnology.org/about_us/awards/ferguson.html)

To read the complete issue and Maxson review, see: Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol.89, issue 4, October 1965 (journals.psu.edu/index.php/pmhb/issue/view/2435)

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