Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

HOW MONEY IS COINED. 233 The gold ingots, which all come from the Bank of England, weigh 400 ounces apiece, and there are times when the Mint has a little stock of 35 tons of gold to go on with. Silver ingots, on the other hand, weigh about 100 lb. each, and there may be a small matter of 20 tons in stock at a time. Copper is also required, but this does not always arrive in the form of ingots nowadays, but is delivered the form of blank discs, ready for stamping into bronze coins, of which the average production is a ton per day. Every morning the chief officials have to decide what coins are to be made. Some- times the Bank of England informs the Mint that it is running short of half-sover- eigns ; at another time there may be a demand from the by a Birmingham factory in MARKING- MACHINE. Bank of South Africa for an extra supply of silver money. All these little points have to be taken into consideration, and the work is planned out accordingly. Let us suppose that sovereigns are to be made on a certain day. So much gold, with the proper propor- tion of alloy, is weighed out and delivered to the superintendent, who is responsible for passing it on from room to room, until he returns it again to the chief office in precisely 30 the same weight of metal, but in the form of finished coins. His first care is to pass it on to the melting house. This is a sort of kitchen, with separate departments for gold and silver, and a staff of about sixteen men. A couple of ingots, with some of the waste gold left after the coins have been cut from the strips, are dropped into a ROLLING FILLETS. blacklead crucible, which is then lowered into one of the eight furnaces that stand in a row. The gold and the copper are slowly melted until they have the appear- ance of so much dull coloured liquor. At the end of an hour the red-hot crucible is lifted by means of tongs, and the molten gold poured into eight or nine moulds, each of which produces a bar of the value of about £600. Each of the furnaces is therefore able to melt its little potful six times in the course of the day, and when the Mint is engaged upon this feast of Midas, it is able to turn out golden bars at the rate of a quarter of a million sterling every day. The same course is pursued when boiling- silver, except that the blacklead saucepans used for this metal hold about 5>oo° oz- apiece. No one could possibly lift such a weight. The silver crucibles, therefore, are picked up by an electric crane, which carries them round the melting house with startling