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Guatemala - real niquel

Started by <k>, March 06, 2023, 02:29:21 PM

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<k>

Guatemala 1 real 1900.jpg

Guatemala, 1 real, 1900.


This coin is made of copper-nickel.

What was the purpose of the word NIQUEL in the exergue?
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FosseWay

I'm guessing it was to highlight that it wasn't made of silver. Many South American reales were silver, and it was apparently sufficiently important to people to know how much silver and of what fineness their coins contained that this information was often included in coin legends.

It may also be that forgeries of silver coins existed in silver-coloured metals, and adding niquel explicitly here made it clear that it was officially and intentionally not made of silver.

<k>

I see. So it's a kind of emblem of the changeover from silver. Some countries were still using silver as late as the 1960s, I understand.
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See: The Royal Mint Museum.

Manzikert

Yes, Switzerland for example up to 1967, replaced by cupro-nickel in 1968.

Alan

andyg

It might have simply been in some legislation somewhere,






There are other examples from around the world,
always willing to trade modern UK coins for modern coins from elsewhere....

FosseWay

A whole clutch of countries ditched silver in the mid-1960s - the US, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Sweden, South Africa, the Netherlands... But in none of these cases did the coins have something written on them to differentiate the non-silver ones from their predecessors. I guess by then, people regarded coins as automatically being worth what they said they were worth, or what the central bank said they were worth, and the thought that they might have an intrinsic value, never mind needed to have one, was long gone.

In 1900, when <k>'s coin was produced, many countries - including AFAIK pretty much all of America, north and south - still had silver coinage which, although probably not worth its face value in silver, at least had a considerable intrinsic value. Most New World and European countries did not fully move away from this until after the First World War, or even later (up to the 60s, as mentioned above). So in 1900 it was a novelty, and the kind of novelty that perhaps needed explaining, or at least very clear marking to show that no-one was trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes.

Alex Island

The most interesting nickel was made from wood  :)
The Chicago World's Fair in 1933 issued wooden nickels, and the tradition of wooden nickels as tokens and souvenirs continues to the present day.
All islands around the world & islands coin

<k>

Quote from: andyg on March 06, 2023, 06:39:53 PMThere are other examples from around the world

COBRE - Spanish for copper. I never knew that.

So the Guatemalan example is far from being a one-off.
Visit the website of The Royal Mint Museum.

See: The Royal Mint Museum.