William Wheeler Hubbell

William Wheeler Hubbell was not a sculptor, an engraver, or a Mint employee. He was a Philadelphia patent attorney and a relentless inventor — the kind of nineteenth-century mind that saw a problem and reached for a patent.

His inventions ran to hardware, not art. In 1844 he patented a breechloading firearm, built in collaboration with the Philadelphia gunmaker John Wurfflein — a hinged-breech design decades ahead of the famous trapdoor and Snider rifles it resembled. During the Civil War he turned to ordnance, patenting an explosive shell and percussion fuse used by the great guns of U.S. Navy ships and gunboats. He spent much of his life arguing that the government owed him for using his ideas — a fight that reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1900 in Hubbell v. United States, over one of his cartridge patents. (He lost.)

So why is an inventor of guns and shells on a coin site? Because in the 1870s Hubbell aimed his patent instinct at money itself. On May 22, 1877, he received U.S. Patent No. 191,146 for an "Improvement in Metal Alloys for Commercial Coin." He called his alloy goloid — gold and silver melted together with a little copper. An ancient idea wearing a new name: the Greeks had a word for natural gold-silver alloy, electrum. Hubbell's pitch was that a single small coin could carry both metals at once, settling the bitter "gold versus silver" money fight that dominated American politics in his day.

Hubbell's genius — and his trap — was chemistry, not design. Goloid was a blend: in his patent the proportions ran to roughly one part gold, twenty-four parts silver, and two and a half parts copper, with the gold-to-silver ratio adjustable. The gold gave the coin a faint golden cast; most of its value came from the silver hidden inside.

He didn't engrave the coins himself. The dies were cut by the Mint's own artists — William Barber and his son Charles, and George T. Morgan, the engraver of the Morgan dollar. What Hubbell supplied was the idea on the coin: the legends. Goloid pieces wear their own recipe as decoration. The 1878–1880 goloid metric dollar spelled out its weight and proportions in the design, and the issue dubbed the "metric" dollar even put the word METRIC on the reverse. Hubbell was a true believer in the metric system, and he wanted the coin to advertise it.

That literal-mindedness produced his most spectacular pattern. When the plain goloid dollar stalled, Hubbell proposed a "metric-goloid" double eagle — a $20 piece — built in round metric numbers: 30 grams of gold, 1.5 grams of silver, and 3.5 grams of copper. At the standard 16-to-1 silver-to-gold ratio of the era, that came out to $20 of metal. The coin's obverse circles Liberty's head not with words but with the formula itself — +30+G+1.5+S+3.5+C+35+G+R+A+M+S+ — gold, silver, copper, total grams. The reverse swaps the usual IN GOD WE TRUST for the Latin DEO EST GLORIA, "to God is the glory." Collectors call it the Quintuple Stella, because $20 is five times the famous $4 Stella pattern of the same years.

There was just one fatal flaw, and the Mint spotted it fast. Goloid looked exactly like ordinary 90% silver. You could not tell the gold was in there without a chemistry lab. Mint Director Henry Linderman is said to have handed congressmen goloid coins and plain silver ones and challenged them to tell which was which — they couldn't. A coin a counterfeiter could fake by leaving the expensive gold out entirely was, the Mint concluded, a gift to forgers. Goloid died on the table.