The Goloid Metric Dollar: the coin that printed its own recipe

In the 1870s, America was fighting about money — literally, what money should be made of.

In 1873 Congress passed a coinage law that quietly stopped minting the standard silver dollar. Silver miners and farmers called it the "Crime of '73." They wanted silver back in the nation's pockets; bankers and creditors wanted gold and only gold. The country split into camps, and "gold versus silver" became one of the loudest arguments in American politics for the next twenty years.

Into that fight walked a Philadelphia inventor named Dr. William Wheeler Hubbell. In 1877 he patented an alloy he called goloid — a blend of gold, silver, and copper melted together. His pitch was elegant: if a single dollar held some gold and a lot of silver, both sides of the argument might get a piece of what they wanted in one coin. No more either-or.

Congress was interested enough to test it. The Mint struck experimental dollars — patterns, meaning trial coins never meant to spend — in goloid, between 1878 and 1880. The most striking of them announced exactly what they were. They are called Goloid Metric Dollars, and they are some of the strangest objects the U.S. Mint ever made.

Turn the coin over and you are reading a chemistry label.

The reverse — the "tails" side — carries a ring of 38 stars around four lines of numbers: 15.3—G. / 236.7—S. / 28—C. / 14 GRAMS. That is the recipe: parts of gold, silver, and copper, and the coin's total weight in grams. Around the rim run UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and 100 CENTS; arched inside are the words GOLOID METRIC DOLLAR and the Latin motto DEO EST GLORIA — "Glory to God." It is one of very few U.S. designs to state its value two ways at once, in cents and in metric weight. The "metric" in the name was a nod to the era's dream of putting American money on the worldwide metric system.

The front — the obverse, the "heads" side — came in two flavors, because two of the Mint's best engravers each took a turn.

William Barber, the Chief Engraver of the United States Mint, drew a head of Liberty facing left, a broad band in her hair spelling LIBERTY in sunken letters, with stalks of wheat and cotton behind her — the crops of North and South. George T. Morgan, the younger English-trained engraver who had just given America the Morgan dollar, offered his own Liberty with coiled, braided hair. Both versions were struck in 1879 and again in 1880. (Auction catalogs still tell you which engraver's head you're looking at when one comes up for sale.)

The metal itself is the quiet star. The goloid is about 5.5% gold, 84.5% silver, and 10% copper — a faint trace of gold dissolved into a silver coin. To the eye, it just looks like silver. That, it turned out, was the whole problem.

Here is the flaw that doomed a clever idea. A goloid dollar held real gold — but you could not see it. Mint Director Henry R. Linderman set two coins in front of Congress, one goloid and one plain silver, and admitted the result plainly: "It is very difficult for anybody to tell the difference, for the general appearance is the same."

That sealed it. A counterfeiter could mint a coin from cheap silver and copper alone — no gold — and pass it off as a goloid dollar. The honest version carried a slice of gold a forger could simply leave out and pocket. A coin that anyone can fake at a profit is not a coin; it's a trap. Congress walked away and instead passed the Bland–Allison Act of 1878, which brought back the ordinary silver dollar — the Morgan dollar you can still buy today.

So the Goloid Metric Dollar never spent a day in anyone's pocket. What survives are the trial pieces, and they survive because of a wonderful piece of Gilded Age salesmanship. In 1879 the Mint sold three-coin sets to collectors: a Goloid Metric Dollar, a plainer Goloid Dollar, and — the headliner — the famous $4 "Stella," a glittering gold pattern. Congressmen could buy the set for $6.10; everyone else paid $15. At least 425 of the accompanying Stellas were struck, which is roughly the order of how many of the most common Goloid Metric Dollars exist.

For collectors, that scarcity is the appeal. These are patterns — never issued, struck in the hundreds, catalogued by their numbers in the Judd reference (the standard guide to U.S. pattern coins). Some varieties, like the goloid Judd-1626, turn up at auction with real regularity. Others — the copper trial strikes, the Morgan-head versions — are rated R.7 on the rarity scale, meaning only a handful are known to exist. High grades are scarce for the simplest reason: almost none were made to begin with, so every survivor is a near-survivor. To own one is to hold a road the country chose not to take.