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Standing Liberty Quarter-a Days Wage For A Miner In 1930


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My dad was a young teenager (13, 14, 15) during the WWII years.  And because men of draft age were leaving town in his small Texas town, that opened up jobs for young teens.  Eg.:  Gas stations, store clerks, etc......    And I guess there were no child-labor laws in those days (ie.:  younger teens could enter the work force w/o question).   I remember my dad telling me that he worked in a movie-theater during the war years (manning the ticket booth and popcorn sales).   And his pay was :  .07c per hour !  

 

So a standing lib. quarter like that would be like 4 hrs. of work !   Doh !  

 

As far as adult pay goes, I read that lower level blue-collar laborers , in the 1880s, might have $20 for a month's work, with room & board.  So as you can see, with that formula, you can see that an adult's wage was only like .10 or .15c p/h .

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I did a little reading on silver and mercury, silver and mercury will form an amalgam, just like it will with gold, the mercury will dissolve the gold until it reaches a saturation point and it's does the same with silver, so when he put mercury on the SL quarter it dissolved a bit of the surface silver which left the quarter shiny.

Here's video where the guy does the same with a 1953 silver quarter, you can see the amalgam forming as he rubs it off and eventually he cleans the quarter with a cloth and it looks pretty close to a new quarter albeit with some loss of surface silver.

I wouldn't recommend doing this with a silver coin especially if it's a rare date that you may want to get graded because it will lower the grade from the loss of silver and the grading service may very will be able to tell what was done to the coin...or maybe they won't be able to tell but I wouldn't risk it with a rare date.

And also as mentioned and as we all know or should know breathing the mercury fumes is not good!!

 

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5 hours ago, Gold Seeker said:

I did a little reading on silver and mercury, silver and mercury will form an amalgam, just like it will with gold, the mercury will dissolve the gold until it reaches a saturation point and it's does the same with silver, so when he put mercury on the SL quarter it dissolved a bit of the surface silver which left the quarter shiny.

When you rub mercury on a 95% copper cent, it doesn't clean off a layer of tarnished copper alloy, leaving a fresh clean copper surface.  Instead it leaves a white metal coating on the coin.

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32 minutes ago, GB_Amateur said:

When you rub mercury on a 95% copper cent, it doesn't clean off a layer of tarnished copper alloy, leaving a fresh clean copper surface.  Instead it leaves a white metal coating on the coin.

Not sure what you're trying to say...but mercury does dissolve gold and silver as well as many other metals, but you're correct about copper and some other metals because manganese, copper and zinc are resistant in being dissolved/forming an amalgam with mercury. 

"Mercury dissolves many metals such as gold and silver to form amalgams. Iron is an exception, and iron flasks have traditionally been used to trade mercury. Several other first row transition metals with the exception of manganese, copper and zinc are also resistant in forming amalgams. Other elements that do not readily form amalgams with mercury include platinum."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(element)

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9 hours ago, Gold Seeker said:

Not sure what you're trying to say...

We currently have two candidate explanations of why a 90% silver, 10% copper coin would look shiny after being immersed/dipped/smeared in mercury.  Yours is that the Mercury removes some of the surface of the coin, leaving a fresh looking coin -- lustre actually is the original Ag-Cu alloy.  Mine is that the mercury stays on the surface -- lustre is actually from the mercury coating.  (Both of us allude to mercury's ability to alloy with many metals.)

I used the 95% copper cent example as evidence that a mercury coating explains the silver coin's lustre since that's what happens to a copper cent when it comes into intimate contact with mercury.

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On 3/6/2022 at 12:41 PM, Gold Seeker said:

First I've heard of using mercury to cleanup a silver coin, please post a photo of how it looks now.

Here you go, Skip!

Quarter.JPG

DSCN0826.JPG

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8 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

We currently have two candidate explanations of why a 90% silver, 10% copper coin would look shiny after being immersed/dipped/smeared in mercury.  Yours is that the Mercury removes some of the surface of the coin, leaving a fresh looking coin -- lustre actually is the original Ag-Cu alloy.  Mine is that the mercury stays on the surface -- lustre is actually from the mercury coating.  (Both of us allude to mercury's ability to alloy with many metals.)

I used the 95% copper cent example as evidence that a mercury coating explains the silver coin's lustre since that's what happens to a copper cent when it comes into intimate contact with mercury.

OK so you disagree, but I still say the quarter lost silver form the surface of the coin, in the video I posted one can clearly see the mercury/silver amalgamation taking place as he dips and rubs the quarter in the mercury, it's as clear as day, also being that the silver content in the quarter out weights the copper content 9:1 there's going to be a loss of silver, granted a very small amount of mercury may have stuck to the quarter but it would be easily removed when he then rubbed the quarter with the cloth.

We'll have to just agree to disagree but I think the science is on my side in this subject, especially with the high silver content in the quarter.

On another note to help prove the cleaning of the quarter of mercury with a cloth would remove any mercury on the surface is when gold miners used an amalgam plate to recover gold, i.e. a copper plate coated with mercury that the gold slurry runs over to capture fine gold the mercury/gold amalgam was easily removed from the plate for the gold extraction process, they simply scrapped it off the copper plate, so using a cloth would further remove the mercury.

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24 minutes ago, Gold Seeker said:

We'll have to just agree to disagree....

Nothing wrong with that.  When you mentioned copper plates being used in the refining of gold I Googled and found this interesting article:

https://www.911metallurgist.com/blog/mercury-gold-amalgamation-works

Unfortunately it refers back to another page on how the copper plates are initally prepared (as if this article has been cut and pasted from a book).  Still a good read and has some interesting videos embedded.

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This post brought back memories of my father showing us the mercury from a broken thermometer. He let us roll it around in our palms! Eventually, I remember him “soaking it up” with a silver dime. Yikes!

But then we road around in the back of the station wagon without seatbelts, and never even imagined bicycle helmets. 

 

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8 hours ago, Old Line Paul said:

This post brought back memories of my father showing us the mercury from a broken thermometer. He let us roll it around in our palms! Eventually, I remember him “soaking it up” with a silver dime. Yikes!

But then we road around in the back of the station wagon without seatbelts, and never even imagined bicycle helmets. 

 

We played with mercury as kids as well any time a thermometer got broken.

But we used to ride in the bed of the pickup truck....and sitting on the sides going down the interstate highway at 75 MPH, we were lucky none of us ever fell out, I have 4 brothers and 4 sisters and there was almost always 4 or 5 of us back there and usually one or two of our dogs!!

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