1792 ENCYCLOPAEDIA DESCRIBES CASTAING MACHINE

Last week Dick Johnson described four-leaf clovers found in a book. I found the same, in the first encyclopedia published in the United States, Thomas Dobson’s Encyclopædia, published from 1790 to 1803, with the early volumes illustrated by engraver Robert Scot. My set has an interesting history, it was once in the library of the Reformatory Prison for Women, located in Massachusetts. This prison valued education and had a working farm, evidently with some four-leaf clovers.

The Encyclopædia disseminated Enlightenment knowledge and advancing technology. There was much numismatic information with articles on coins, coining, engraving, and drawing including classical figures and draperies. The British claimed, “British Coinage, both by the beauty of the engraving, and the invention of the impressions on the edges, that admirable expedient for preventing the alteration of the species, is carried to the utmost perfection.”

The following excerpt represents an instructive technology transfer for the fabrication of a machine, described by the British, used to impress coinage edge designs and to thicken a rim, now commonly called a Castaing machine after Jean Castaing. With a stroke of good luck, the publication of Volume 5 in Philadelphia on was March 10, 1792, just prior to the Coinage Act on April 2, 1792. The Mint’s complex rimming machine would have required instruction for the fabrication details, and reverse engineering of dollar and half dollar edges by Russ Logan and others indicate a machine exactly as described by the Coining article in the Encyclopædia:

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
NOTES FROM E-SYLUM READERS: FEBRUARY 18, 2018 : Found in Books (http://www.coinbooks.org/v21/esylum_v21n07a12.html)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web