Money Museum

Today's Feature: 1972 D Eisenhower Dollar Error Capped Die - ANA 1979.149.72 | Object: # 197 🇺🇸

Sometimes a mistake at the Mint doesn’t produce just one error—it produces a whole sequence of them. A die cap begins when a struck coin fails to eject and instead sticks to one of the dies. As the press continues operating, that trapped coin strikes the planchets that follow. With each blow, the struck coin spreads and stretches around the die, eventually taking on a bottle-cap or thimble-like shape. The resulting coins can show increasingly distorted, weak, or brockage-like impressions, preserving different stages of the same mechanical failure.

By the 1970s, errors like this were developing a collecting culture of their own. Organizations including the Numismatic Error Collectors of America (NECA) and Collectors of Numismatic Errors (CONE) connected specialists through publications such as Errorscope and The Errorgram, while Error Trends Coin Magazine helped document and popularize unusual Mint mistakes. Dealers such as John Devine—better known as “Lonesome John”—built national businesses around errors. What had once been dismissed simply as defective money was becoming a recognized numismatic specialty. Collectors weren’t just finding mistakes anymore; they were learning to reconstruct how the Mint made them.

💬 Put your error-detective skills to work: what do you think happened at the press to create this coin?

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Today's Feature: 1971 S Eisenhower Dollar - ANA 1989.85.134 | Object: # 196 🇺🇸

In 1971, the dollar coin returned after a 35-year absence. No U.S. dollar coins had been struck for circulation since the final Peace dollars of 1935. The new coin honored President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who died in 1969, while its reverse celebrated a recent American achievement: the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Chief Engraver Frank Gasparro adapted astronaut Michael Collins’s mission insignia, showing an eagle descending onto the lunar surface with an olive branch in its talons. Earth hangs in the distance.

But there were really two Eisenhower dollars. Coins intended for circulation were copper-nickel clad, while the San Francisco Mint produced special 40% silver-clad dollars exclusively for collectors in both Uncirculated and Proof finishes. The 1971 S, therefore, continued a shift already visible in the 1970 D Kennedy half: the Mint was developing versions of regular U.S. denominations specifically for the collector market. Sold in distinctive packaging, the Uncirculated silver dollars soon acquired a collector nickname that remains familiar today—the “Blue Ikes.”

💬 If you were designing the Eisenhower dollar, would you pair Ike with Apollo 11? Or would you choose something from Eisenhower’s own life for the reverse? Or, even more interestingly, would you keep the reverse but change the historical figure on the obverse?

Explore our (R)evolution in Currency features online today: https://www.money.org/money-museum/america250/

Today's Feature: 1970 Kennedy Half Dollar - ANA 1984.72.1119 | Object: # 195 🇺🇸

By 1970, the Kennedy half dollar had developed a strange problem: Americans wanted them, but they didn’t necessarily want to spend them. Since Kennedy’s assassination, the Mint had produced more than a billion halves, yet sentimental saving, collecting, and the coin’s silver content continually pulled them from circulation. In 1970, the Denver Mint struck just 2,150,000 Kennedy halves. Not one was intended for circulation.

The 1970 D thus became something unusual: a regular-issue coin made specifically for collectors and produced only for Uncirculated Mint Sets. It was also the final business-strike Kennedy half containing 40% silver. Copper-nickel halves returned to circulation in 1971, but the denomination’s everyday use continued to decline. By 2002, the Mint again shifted to producing Kennedy halves primarily for collectors, selling circulating-quality coins through Mint Sets, rolls, and bags, rather than routinely releasing them through the Federal Reserve. The 1970 D offers an early glimpse of a brewing fundamental change. Collectors were becoming a market the Mint could serve directly, producing coins not for commerce, but collection.

💬 This 1970 D was a regular issue coin you couldn’t get in change. Does that make it a circulating coin—or a collector coin?

Explore our (R)evolution in Currency features online today: https://www.money.org/money-museum/america250/

Today's Feature: 1969 $500 Federal Reserve Note, Series 1928A - ANA 2023.3.23 | Object: # 194 🇺🇸

In 1969, America’s big bills reached the end of the line. The $500, $1,000, $5,000, and $10,000 Federal Reserve notes had last been printed in 1945, but existing supplies continued to be issued for another 24 years. By then, checks and improved bank-transfer systems had largely replaced the transactions for which high-denomination currency was once useful. On July 14, 1969, the Treasury and Federal Reserve announced that denominations above $100 would no longer be issued.

This Series 1928A $500 Federal Reserve Note, bearing the signatures of Treasurer Walter O. Woods and Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, represents the kind of large-denomination currency that was disappearing. After 1969, high-denomination notes returned to Federal Reserve Banks were withdrawn from circulation rather than reissued, steadily reducing the number available to collectors. They were never demonetized, however. This not remains legal tender for $500 today—but its scarcity, age, condition, and collector demand give it a value of more than 10 times its face.

💬 This $500 bill is worth more than ten times face to collectors. What note have you owned that dramatically outgrew its denomination?

Explore our (R)evolution in Currency features online today: https://www.money.org/money-museum/america250/

Today's Feature: 1968 S U.S. Proof Set - ANA 1998.30.908 | Object: # 193 🇺🇸

In 1968, Proof Sets returned after a three-year hiatus—and they returned with an “S.” During the coin shortage of 1965-1967, traditional Proof and Uncirculated Sets were suspended, mintmarks disappeared, and collectors were instead offered Special Mint Sets. In 1968, mintmarks and Proof Sets returned, with San Francisco taking over proof production from Philadelphia. The change helped establish the role the San Francisco Mint continues to play today as the primary producer of America’s collector coinage.

Proof Sets also became an accessible doorway into numismatics. For a relatively modest price, a collector could receive specially struck examples of every circulation denomination directly from the Mint. As production increased through the following decades and new products such as Silver and Prestige Proof Sets joined the lineup, these sets became a familiar starting point for generations of collectors. Many were carefully stored away, which helps explain why decades-old Proof Sets remain so readily available today.

💬 Did a Proof or Mint Set help start your collection? If so, do you still have it?

Explore our (R)evolution in Currency features online today: https://www.money.org/money-museum/america250/

Explore the ANA Money Museum’s award-winning The Silk Road(s) virtual exhibit! 🏆✨

Linking the civilizations of East and West, the "Silk Road" is a simple term for a vast, fascinating web of trade routes that stretched across Eurasia and reshaped world history.

Discover the ancient coins, culture, and commerce that connected the globe—all from the comfort of home.

Start your online journey along the Silk Road today! 👇
🔗 https://www.money.org/money-museum/virtual-exhibits-silk/

The Silk Road(s) | Money Museum Linking civilizations of East and West, the Silk Road is a simple term that represents a complicated and vast web of interconnected routes stretching across Eurasia. Beginning around 100 BC, the world’s first large-scale system of globalization - the Silk Road(s) - fostered the exchange of people,...

Today's Feature: 1967 Kennedy Half Dollar - ANA 1972.27.194 | Object: # 192 🇺🇸

By 1967, silver was disappearing from American pocket change—but not all at once. Dimes and quarters had switched to copper-nickel clad construction in 1965, while the Kennedy half dollar retained 40% silver. Its construction was itself a compromise: a silver-copper core was sandwiched between outer layers containing 80% silver, allowing the half dollar to retain some precious metal while using substantially less than its 90% predecessor.

At the same time, the government was recovering the old silver coins still circulating alongside their replacements. The Mint’s 1968 annual report recorded millions of dollars in silver quarters and dimes being separated form clad coins, withdrawn from circulation, and melted. Thus Americans in 1967 could carry three generations of metallic money at once: old 90% silver coins, new copper-nickel clad coins, and 40% silver Kennedy halves like this one. The transition from silver happened coin by coin!

💬 Collectors have plenty of tricks for spotting silver. Without checking the date, how would you distinguish this 40% silver half from a later clad Kennedy?

Explore our (R)evolution in Currency features online today: https://www.money.org/money-museum/america250/

Today's Feature: 1966 Special Mint Set - ANA 2009.0032.0133 | Object: # 191 🇺🇸

In the mid-1960s, coin collectors found themselves partly blamed for a national coin shortage. With silver coins disappearing from circulation, the government feared that collecting by date and mintmark was encouraging still more coins to be set aside. Proof and Uncirculated Mint Sets were suspended, and mintmarks disappeared entirely from U.S. coinage from 1965 through 1967. Yet the Mint did not abandon collectors altogether. Instead, it offered a compromise: the Special Mint Set.

Produced only from 1965 through 1967, these sets contained specially prepared versions of each circulating denomination. The coins were struck at the San Francisco Assay Office using polished dies and received a better finish than ordinary circulation strikes, though they fell short of true Proofs. Some SMS coins display the frosted devices and mirrored fields prized by collectors as Cameo and Deep Cameo finishes.

This 1966 set contains a cent, nickel, dime, quarter, and a 40% silver Kennedy half dollar. The Mint produced 2,261,583 sets dated 1966, creating an unusual three-year chapter in which the government simultaneously tried to discourage coin collecting, while making sure collectors still had something special to collect.

💬 Only some SMS coins developed the frosted devices collectors associate with Cameo contrast. Can you spot the light frosting on the reverse?

Explore our (R)evolution in Currency features online today: https://www.money.org/money-museum/america250/

Today's Feature: 1965 Washington Quarter Dollar - ANA 2009.32.133 | Object: # 190 🇺🇸

For generations, Americans could hear silver in their pocket change. That began to change in 1965. Rising demand for silver and dwindling government supplies led Congress to remove the precious metal from dimes and quarters. The new quarter sandwiched a pure copper core between layers of copper-nickel, preserving the familiar silvery appearance while reducing its weight from 6.25 to 5.67 grams. The composition was carefully engineered to ensure the new coins would still work alongside silver coins in vending machines and other coin-operated devices.

The Mint also needed an enormous number of them. With silver coins already being hoarded and a nationwide coin shortage underway, it struck 1,819,717,540 quarters dated 1965—the highest mintage of any Washington quarter to that point. The change proved permanent: although the Kennedy half dollar temporarily retained some silver, America’s dime and quarter had entered their clad era. Look at the edge of almost any quarter in your pocket today, and the exposed core still reveals the solution adopted in 1965.

👂 How’s your hearing? When you hear a quarter hit the counter, can you tell if it’s silver or clad without looking?

Explore our (R)evolution in Currency features online today: https://www.money.org/money-museum/america250/