WHERE THE GOVERNMENT MAKES CENTS

Somewhere between your couch cushions or the cupholders of your car, in a piggy bank or a wishing well or on the sidewalk of any street, there's a penny or a nickel or a dime or a quarter with an inconspicuous D beside the head of a president.

That's D for Denver. Specifically, for the Denver Mint.

And somewhere inside the white, ornate block of a building in the heart of the Mile High City, there's a charming, retired teacher-turned-tour guide cracking his usual line.

Now, Joe Blackman says to his 14 guests, we're going to show you where the government makes cents.

Welcome to one of the land's six U.S. Mint facilities, for more than a century manufacturing the change that makes the national economy go around. But only two make circulating coins: Philadelphia provides for populations east of the Mississippi River, while Denver delivers for those west.

The two Mints are itinerary stops for tourists. They come with an obvious curiosity, one that might've been sparked amid the coin shortage of the pandemic, and one that might be somehow poignant in this age of digital commerce, when the coin seems all too fated for those dark spaces of couches and crummy curbs.

People want to see how their money is made, Blackman says. It's exciting for them.

The technology has changed since the first silver and gold coins were struck here in 1906 along Colfax Avenue. But the process is much the same. On tours, people watch as man and machine work.

 

Massive metal sheets are fed into blanking presses that punch the shape of coins — kind of like giant cookie cutters, Blackman says during the tour. The blanks, he says, are bound for a furnace heated to 1,700 degrees. That softens the material for proper ridging around the edges and stamping of heads and tails.

We can do 750 coins per minute, Blackman says. We make 25 to 30 million of them every day.

 

At the Denver Mint, tourists start in an exhibit displaying ancient money. Turquoise of the Egyptian pharos. Jade of the Aztecs. A boar tusk used in New Guinea and shells used in Asia. Bronze lepton issued by Pontius Pilate of Judea.

It all recalls something the Denver Mint's boss, Johnson, has wondered:

I think about the coins that people find and collect from the Roman Empire, and I think about the coins made here, and I wonder what people will be looking at 1,000 years from now, 2,000 years from now. And I can't help but wonder if people will know about Denver, Colorado, if nothing else because there's that ‘D' on the coin.

To read the complete article, see:
Where the government makes cents: Welcome to the Denver Mint (https://gazette.com/life/in-the-heart-of-denver-a-minting-tradition-as-old-as-america/article_1d0430ae-2fc3-11ed-9c7a-ffa62e94b0d0.html)

 

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