Rare 1859 gold sovereign highlights Michigan sale
- Published: Mar 31, 2019, 7 AM
A batch of gold sent to the Royal Mint was thought unsuitable for coinage, so the mint planned to melt it.
Employee George Frederick Ansell (who worked at the Royal Mint at the time, in the rolling room) had another idea.
A relic of his efforts highlights Numismatic Auctions LLC’s April 29 auction in Okemos, Michigan.
Inside Coin World: Collector finds Chicago businessman’s lucky silver dollar giveaways: Responses to collector questions, market trends for the 1895-O Barber dime, and the impact of the first grading guide are all the focus of columns in the April 15 “Coin World.”
The gold in the questionable batch contained so much antimony, arsenic and lead that it was deemed, at first, to be unusable, too brittle for coinage.
According to Michael Marsh, in The Gold Sovereign, “Ansell asked to experiment with this gold, and although confronted by several obstacles, including the aversion to change, he was eventually given permission. His experiments brought a successful conclusion and as a result all of the gold was re-wrought at very little additional cost, and without annealing.”
The new sovereigns were so tough, Marsh wrote, “that an ordinary man could not break them even with the aid of a pair of pliers.”
To differentiate these newly struck coins made of the suspect metal, Ansell had an extra line added to Queen Victoria’s hair fillet so that his sovereigns might be identified and tested.
Duly tested, they were found to be fully fit for commerce, not at all brittle, and thus were released into commercial use. It is not known exactly when they were first called “brittle” by numismatists; possibly they were so called in jest by Ansell.
Ansell was awarded £100 for his efforts (an enormous sum in his day) and received a letter of appreciation from the master of the Royal Mint.
According to Stanley Gibbons, the Ansell variety has a mintage of 167,539, in the total calendar year mintage of 1,547,603.
Very few examples of the Ansell rarity survive today; Marsh suggests between 11 and 20 known examples. The coins went unnoticed for many years, so by the time collectors recognized them, most had perished and many of the remaining pieces show considerable wear.
The firm describes the coin in the auction as About Very Fine/Extremely Fine with “some faint hairlines and light trivial marks.”
Connect with Coin World:
Sign up for our free eNewsletter
Access our Dealer Directory
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
Community Comments
-
World Coins Nov 2, 2024, 9 PM
18th-century British wildman token leads Baldwin’s sale
-
US Coins Nov 2, 2024, 12 PM
Moran receives commission as Kentucky Colonel
-
Paper Money Nov 1, 2024, 9 PM
Obsoletes take center stage in Heritage fall offering
-
World Coins Nov 1, 2024, 12 PM
2024 Swiss 25-franc coin inspired by classic design