I had a great time on my trip the Philadelphia Mint last week, and wanted to share the tour experience.
Located just steps from the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, the mint tour is a self guided walk through of the largest coin making factory in the world. Built in 1969, this 4th version of the Philadelphia facility is a modern factory for the minting of billions of coins each year.
Unfortunately, there are no pictures allowed to be taken inside of the building, but that does not diminish the experience. All told, with a quick trip to the gift shop, the tour took approximately one hour. I was lucky that only a few other people on the tour, so this allowed me to experience everything the mint had to offer.
Before picking up my 12 page handbook, I checked out the display of all the modern and special coins made by the mint. A big thrill for me was seeing the $50 gold piece, which I expected to be larger.
After a trip up two very long escalators, I began walking down a long narrow gray hallway. One side of the tour includes facts, pictures and graphics about the coin making process. One the other, clear glass allows visitors to look at the actual factory floor, where real workers engaged in the coin making process.
The art of coins and die making were at the first part of the trip. The most interesting items here, and possibly of the whole tour, were the project coins. These are dummy coins that made to test different dies. The coins I saw had a Native American head on the obverse side, and the words nonsense arched on the back. These looked to be state quarter test dies, and were very interesting.
Glancing over to the factory, the mint installed large touch screens where visitors can understand what types of machines are on the factory floor.
One of the interactive displays told visitors about why there is reeding on coins, and challenged the visitor to guess each coin by touch. The display allowed you to touch each coin denomination inside the display and then hit a light to reveal the coin below.
On the factory side, I saw pennies and what looked like nickels being moved on conveyor belts. Also, there was a factory worker moving a giant box of coins on a moving hand truck. From my angle, you could see right down into the giant crate of coins.
There was a display that talked about inspecting coins, but also mentioned that there are some mule coins that will get past mint inspectors and become highly collectible. I thought the mint took an interesting approach to quality control of its product, acknowledging on occasion that mistakes are rare but do happen.
One other display that was interesting was the empty bags of coins. They used to actually make the bags the coins go in at the Philadelphia facility. It’s not every day you can see an empty bag with the words No. 89 $5,000 Eagles 1932 on a empty cloth coin bag.
At the end of the tour, I saw large crates filled with pennies stacked about 20 feet high. The crates were probably the size of a old fashioned VW bug, and no doubt contained millions of pennies. Pennies are the only coin made by the mint that are not counted as they are placed in bags.
After the Tour of the modern factory, visitors can go down the escalator to see other displays, including a hobo nickel display, an early coin press, and planchets of coins from the 1700s.
My last top was the gift shop, where I could find t shirts, souvenirs and lots of coin sets for purchase. The only thing I got was I put a dollar into the machine and got 4 of the latest 2013 which commemorated Perry’s Victory in Ohio. For the numismatic person, the trip is amazing and I highly recommend this free tour to the novice and senior collector.
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