Most people enjoy gold coins and thinking about the old real silver coins that used to make that special ring when they hit the table. If you want to get an idea of the size of those coins in the Old West or when Scrooge treasured them, here’s the way to do it.
The following figures are not exact, and there is an endless history about every number I give you, but this is to give you a ballpark estimate of just how big those coins were and how they felt.
Get yourself a dime, a quarter, and a half dollar.
A silver dollar weighed almost exactly an ounce. So your quarter is still the same size as a quarter of an ounce of silver.
By a great coincidence, gold weighs exactly twice as much as silver. When I say exactly, I mean a cubic foot of gold weighs 1205 pounds and cubic foot of silver weighs 605 pounds.
So look at that quarter coin. If it were silver, it would weigh a quarter of an ounce. If it were gold, it would weigh half an ounce. The price of gold that was set on gold back then was twenty dollars an ounce. That quarter would have been a ten-dollar gold piece.
So those who have never seen a one-dollar gold piece are in for a surprise. It is a tenth the size of a quarter! The old one-dollar gold piece made a dime look HUGE.
If you watch the movie “Scrooge” you will old Scrooge looking at his “gold sovereigns,” They are gold British one-pound coins that he keeps on a red satin slide-out that he keeps locked up except when he slides them out to look at them. All this was supposed to have taken place in 1860, when the coins were the way I am describing here.
What will surprise you is how tiny those “gold sovereigns” are. When I read that grandiose title in history books, I envisioned those “gold sovereign” coins as huge and ringing loudly when they hit the table
A “gold sovereign” was worth just under $5 back then (when the dollar was worth at least twenty of today’s dollars). So the gold sovereign weighed about an quarter of an ounce, as much as a silver quarter, but it was twice as heavy as silver so a gold sovereign was half the size of a quarter. In other words, it was just slightly larger than a dime.
For people my age, the big thing we remember about metal coins is a cowboy in a movie buying a drink and tossing his silver coin on the counter. It rang when it hit. The pay of a cowboy was about $20 a month, but they were SILVER dollars, worth at least twenty of our dollars apiece, and he got his place to sleep on the ground and his beans and beef free on the trail. By the standards of the European working class back then he lived like a king.
And when he hit town, he DID have some coins to ring on the bar top.
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