simply too easy to slice without anyone noticing. The authorities realized that to stop the bleeding, they had to alter the physical architecture of the coins themselves.
The breakthrough came with the transition from hand-hammering to steam and horse-powered rolling mills. In the mid-1600s, a French engineer named Jean Castaing invented an ingenious edge-marking machine. The Castaing machine squeezed blank
coins between two grooved steel bars under tremendous mechanical pressure, etching intricate lettering, stars, or parallel fluting directly onto the narrow edge before the faces were ever stamped.
This process
There’s more to discover. Continue to the next page for the rest of this article.
