DrLarry

thanks for that

yes I agree that balanced approaches are best and I hope that is what we may have more of. In that one instance and considering the number of active participants that last thread came across as very much slanted in that direction especially the ease in which it blossomed. Causes are important and adherence does not preclude balanced participation or view. I have many causes I can still be very flexible and happy to apologise if I get something wrong but then when I say something I try to consider with some care what I write in a forum in order not to cause offence. In my own ideas and theories there are many elements that are so off the deep end that I cannot wonder some find them strange I stick to them as a matter of commitment to idea which may take some years to follow through on. In the coin world as in any other world there are many new and exciting ways to discover something, be that varieties or strange patterns but at the core of that is willingness to cause no offence and to remain open minded. I will however show I have enough confidence not to be bullied, I won't keep my mouth shut if I see something offencive.... that is simply the way I show my life experience in all types of forums.

oh that is interesting , perhaps by this time they knew that the copper pennies were on their last legs as I think many questions had already been tabled in parliament about the state of the pennies in circulation perhaps using the proofs was reasonable to consider especially if by 1858 they had been considering changes to the metal? does anyone have the bronze proof in their collection? what is the size of the 1 in the date is it small or the same size as the general population?

yes I think so too although there are some interesting features on the 5 at the top of this one and the smaller 8 has been moved and the small 1

interestingly the 1 is over a much smaller 1

yes maybe but interestingly this one does not have a W.W on the trunk

one other intriguing thing is that I have a 58 where the 5 appears to be over a 3 with a small bulge in the lower loop of the 8 is it all all possible that the 8 is over a 9 and they reused the proof die for 1839 Penny ?

I have just re-imaged mine upside down and the most interesting thing about it is that bulge on the lower part of the B which on the one I have quite clearly is defined with a continuance into the main part of the lower 8 to me it looks like a 3 under an 8 which might make some sense of the strange angle of the vertical on the right side which seems a little off for a 7 note I have inverted the image

I have one which appears to be the same I always assumed it to be over a 7 however on this one there is less compression on the right side

it looks like perhaps an 8 over a 7 repunched with a second 8

would you be able to tell me what microscope and digital imaging device you are using please

there appears to be a lot of left sided compression on the strike flattening out the numerals is it possible the die has broken and the effect is created by metal caught up and lost

could you please advise me what microscope camera you are using. Are you a petrologist?

well done that will be a really great contribution I have about 80 1853's which I have been studying as part of my collection on copper pennies. Let me know if you need any help there are some strange things going on with some of the legends

yes I think there is an interesting point to be made re: the value of charity. Throughout each year there are always natural and man initiated disasters which actively thrust upon the everyday person devastation hunger and death. Every year disaster management by charities helps populations re-build to live out a meagre life nothing even remotely as fancy and comfortable as our own. We are the fifth largest economy in the world and astonishing and often unbelievable fact (apparently) and we give a tiny fraction of our GDP for development. DFID really are in many ways a marketing tool and a large part of the budget does not go directly to the peoples affected it pays for salaries of civil servants from out own country to work in overseas departments. It is almost impossible for the small charities of which there are millions of to ever get remotely close to any money because as you rightly suggest is pays for development structures within governments it helps. In part it is a bargaining tool to encourage nations from investing disproportionately in space travel or more often buying arms from the western countries and to deal with poverty in other countries. But if you reduce the budget all this does it remove the tool to help the individual. There is fundamental philosophical reason for supporting humanity less able than ourselves to cope with disasters as well as demographic transitions. In the end there is a selfish incentive develop new markets to sell more arms or tobacco too or burberry coats too. Charities that try to get around this barrier to support the individual often face a problem but a few things like access to water and education or rural electrification are often able to kick start individual as well as societal growth. At the bottom of this pile are often the most disenfranchised usually girls and women and if we believe that this country is so great this is in part due to philanthropic attempts in the Victorian age to improve health sanitation education and access to clean water and at the present time to see women as equals.Part of the reason why this forum is able to spout these kind of vile postings is that sadly there are not any active women here as far as I see it and so it has a feeling of "Dad's Shed" about it which is often unhealthy. as for the value of our investment in countries by our contributions. Having lived and worked in countries in Southern Africa and been into to countries such as Romania after the fall of the apartheid and the dictatorship respectively I have seen at first hand how lives have been made sociologically better in that people have freedoms, same in Malawi and Uganda. Ok so the structures may not be fully developed in your life times but if you were an alien living in an imaginary country with perfect lives and you invested in Victorian Britain you would look in your lifetime and think Jesus when is it ever going to get better. But it is a slow process and it is almost impossible to speed up demographic transition thinking that if they just do as we do then life would be sweet but our growth and transition fed on the resources of the very nations you are saying we shouldn't even be willing to help support get water. Now that such resources are gone yes there may be some freedom and yet some power crazy MEN always want more and more of the shinny lumps of flattered metal this group seem to hold in esteem above all else. Greed and power and corruption and a philosophy of look after me first is the very reason why men such as Mugabe reach prominence and then destroy internally all the good that was put in place (and let's remember it was our state funded support of Mugabe that put him there) so if we want things to change then the fundamental shift has to happen within each of us too to reduce the reliance on the need to only feel fulfilled if we have the riches of these shiny lumps of metal in plastic folders or in our pockets and adopt a more holistic and humane approach. I see now that the majority on this forum lean far to the right of centre which is disappointing and conservatism (small c) rarely leads to anything but regressive ideas and practice and usually results in very little development and creative thinking, in truth it hinders all the very reasons and purpose of being on here for me.

careful in this heat and smoke if you have respiratory issues.

oh really i will ask him I get by but it would be nice to have easily digital analysis and processing power to "tidy " things up , more likely I need a good processing package rather than the hardware

yes I have a couple of normal binocular microscopes with cameras attached , you are right it has become a wonderful time in coin collecting. I am thinking of buying one of the 16mp full HD digital microscopes they are about £200 but eager to know if anyone else has one. If I have one fraction of inaccuracy with my work though I will never be able to convince this lot of my research. This is about as clear as I can get with the tools I have but I would like to look at the metallic structure better

yes and I know you said father christmas not the tooth fairy or tinkerbell

if you do get one can I please book some time on it so I might get to the bottom of my silly theory or ask you to look for me LOL....I miss my electron microscope so much

I contacted ebay and sent a report in

Late in the 17th C copper prices were high due to the greater importation of the metal came from Sweden with the opening of deeper less accessible copper deposits in the 18thC improved access as a result of the industrialisation and the development of the Newcomen , then Watt/Boulton or Trevithick steam engines the ability to access copper from the greater depths which would have previously flooded enabled the flow of metal from the SW mines and those quarried in Anglesey. The essential problem lay in the hand of the copper merchants who restricted the smelting thus artificially inflating their own costs and acting as a monopoly to undermine the cost of the ore on the market. Between 1730 to 1760 the output of copper at the very least went up by 400% as the impact of deeper mining made the Devon and cornish mines more cost productive. However the influence of the anglesey mines which had better access to the coal led to a reduction of the commodity value of copper. Britain was more than self sufficient in copper by the end of the 18th C. Boulton's diaries and the numerous legal cases brought to courts attest to the profit to be made from buying regal and smelting it to produce lower quality planchets often produced in Birmingham, which is one of the driving forces behind Boulton's desire to establish a strong position in coining in the region to counter the opinion of many that Birmingham was a den of iniquity in the forging of coin. Birmingham had a terrible reputation as the centre for the production of blanks sent then to London illegally hidden. He himself notes that almost 90% of the coin collected at Turnstiles was fake by the 1790's and 3 out of 5 taken in for smelting of reduced weight. There was a great need for small change agreed but I think it is wrong to suggest that the forgers did not produce them for any other reason than to make a profit. We have both accepted that the coining of copper was considered a low end activity and far less important than gold or silver and hence the RM avoided the need as much as possible to deliver on an issue. Legislation was pretty whooly on the topic, the fundamental issue seems to be one of delivering smaller currency outside of London in the massively growing centres of activity in the midlands and Scotland. The RM seems to have really not wanted to make issues rather than there being a problem with the accessibility to the copper. Anglesey forced the price down so much that there was a slump initially reducing the productivity of the Devon and Cornish mines until after the cheaper quarried lodes were exhausted in Wales by the late 18th C only then could the extensive copper deposits in cornwall again come to prominence and Cornwall and Devon dominated for most of the 19th C. There is here both local /regional need in the industrialised areas and cheap copper which forces the token production. There are few legislative problems with copper compared with silver, but still from all the contemporary sources profit to be made prior to this time from forgery one forgers came to court having made £200,000 estimated profit in two years in silver and copper forgeries. I dont think we can honestly say that the production of copper coins (non-regal) was done out of the goodness of the heart of the forgers in order to meet the needs of their poor neighbours.

I made my apology so the matter is closed

here a few more images . I am sure you must have some that show either movement, overstamping, deepening removal and or a number of stages of change. The most interesting the first of these which I have drawn in the previous posting is associated with a few of the letters having been altered and they appear to have the old style curly bases most notably in the A over A

here are a few of the strange things happening around the B on three 1860's