Coin Monday: The Big Bickford

Jan. 4, 2009

Written by John Dale

A slightly surreal slice-of-life from Heritage, a recent e-mail exchange:

From John Dale to Noah – Still trying to come up with ideas for next Monday’s blog…would a digression into 19th century European monetary unions be interesting at all, do you think?

Reply from Noah to John Dale – As long as you can work in a reference to, or a quote from, The Dude in The Big Lebowski, I think it would be fine…

Reply from John Dale to Noah – In that case, forget it, dude. Let’s go bowling.

… and that’s why today’s topic is the Bickford international coinage proposal, which is well-represented in the January 2010 FUN U.S. Coin Auction, but which is only tangentially related to 19th century European monetary unions.

What the two topics have in common is a nebulous “international coin” movement that saw its 19th century heyday in the 1870s. The Latin Monetary Union, which aligned the values of national currencies of member nations, began with four countries: Belgium, France, Italy, and Switzerland. By 1870, Greece and Spain were also members. Many other countries remained unaligned, however, and currency conversion between, say, Great Britain and France remained frustrating, particularly for occasional travelers.

One such traveler was Dana Bickford, an inventor known in his time for creating an “automatic knitting machine,” but today best known among numismatists for his attempts to create a working international coinage. The Bickford pattern $10 coin lays out its value seven ways: there are six denominations and values in boxes that surround a center listing the weight and metal content.

The proposed gold coins would have been valued at 10 United States dollars; 51.81 French francs; two pounds, one shilling, one penny in British sterling, etc. The center, applicable UBIQUE (or “everywhere” in Latin—thanks, Mrs. Killion!) lists the coin’s weight at 16.72 grams (of gold), 900 fine (or 9/10ths pure).

It’s an utterly delightful and charming idea — until one realizes that as soon as any one country changed the value of its currency relative to the rest, the coin is suddenly wrong. This fatal flaw is why the Bickford $10 trade coin never made it past the pattern stage.

Most of the Bickford $10 patterns produced were made out of copper, like this example. Two precious representatives, however, were made out of gold, and these rarities are among the most prized patterns available to collectors today. One of them, formerly owned by numismatic legends such as Waldo Newcomer, F.C.C. Boyd, and Dr. J. Hewitt Judd (who literally “wrote the book” on patterns), is a highlight of the auction’s Platinum Night session.

In fact, it’s right there on the Platinum Night cover, next to the 1913 Liberty nickel and the 1927-D double eagle. While it may not have the instant recognition of the other two (pattern collectors excluded, of course), the Bickford $10 pattern in gold is actually the rarest of the three. Bidding is up to $725,000 as I type this…where will it end? Nobody will know until the bidding ends on January 7. Heritage’s January 2010 FUN event will be the first great numismatic auction of the new decade. Join us in Florida or on Heritage LIVE!™ to join in all the excitement!

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-John Dale Beety

Coin Monday: "The $100,000 Nickel"? Not Anymore!

November 30, 2009
Written by John Dale Beety
The Heritage Blog

Last week, I mentioned that the January 2010 FUN U.S. Coin Auction contains more than one million-dollar coin. As promised, this week I’ll discuss the other piece. Interestingly enough, this won’t be the first time I’ve talked about this particular million-dollar coin in the blog; I led off my “Seeing Double?” post with a reference to a 1913 Liberty nickel in an episode of Hawaii Five-O.

In early January, the same coin—called “The $100,000 Nickel” at the time of taping and “The Hawaii Five-O Specimen” (among other names) today—will be auctioned by Heritage. There are only five authentic 1913-dated Liberty nickels, and the five have appeared in many of the most famous coin collections of all time. While this is the first time Heritage has offered this or any other 1913 Liberty nickel at auction, there is a Heritage connection in the coin’s past.

Back in 1972, it first became “The $100,000 Nickel” when it was offered by Abe Kosoff for that sum. It was purchased by World Wide Coin Investments, which was co-owned by Warren Tucker, now the Director of Heritage World Coin Auctions.

(Aside: I often call Mr. Tucker Tucker-san, after a humorous incident that took place at a wedding in Tokyo. He had been invited there by the father of the bride, a leading Japanese coin dealer of the day. The wedding guests received appliances as gifts; the men were to get radios, the women crock-pots. As a jest, Mr. Tucker was led to the wrong receiving line, and afterward, the Japanese dealer would greet him with “Ah, Tucker-san, you like the crock-pot?”)

It was shortly after the record-setting and news-making purchase that World Wide Coin Investments lent the 1913 Liberty nickel to production of the Hawaii Five-O episode. Like many high-priced stars of the screen, the 1913 Liberty nickel had a “stunt double” for its various adventures in the show. The actual nickel appears only in close-ups, but in those close-ups, it was seen by millions of viewers, which has led some numismatic experts to call it "The Most Famous Coin in the World".

Before and after its brush with showbiz, the coin has been owned by a variety of famous collectors, including Wall Street scion Colonel E.H.R. Green, Fred Olsen, Dr. Jerry Buss of Los Angeles Lakers fame, and the Texan Reed Hawn. (Reed Hawn’s Class I 1804 dollar was bought by David Queller and sold as part of the Queller Family Collection of Silver Dollars for more than $3.7 million dollars in April 2008, the third-highest price ever brought by a U.S. coin at auction.)

It appeared in the news a month back that CBS is looking to revive the Hawaii Five-O franchise. If they ever do a re-make of “The $100,000 Nickel,” perhaps the coin’s next owner will let it reprise its role. Of course, the episode title is out-of-date now. Nearly four decades on, that $100,000 price tag seems almost quaint. While it’s too early to tell what this 1913 Liberty nickel might bring in January, all the early signs point to “The $3,000,000 Nickel”—or maybe something more.