Will we ever see the return of Russian platinum and palladium coins?

[gxseries]

Just made me wonder... Russia is proud to release world's first and only circulating platinum coins back in 1828. (there were counterfeit gold plated platinum coins that circulated before that but they were not meant to be legal tender). Russia also struck the world's first olympic commemorative coins in platinum in 1977. Palladium coins were struck in 1988.

 

Do you reckon that in 2028, we'll see the 200th anniversary of the world's first platinum coin and 40th anniversary of Russia's first palladium coin?

 

(Would be interesting to revisit this thread in 2028 and see if it does happen).

[Scottishmoney]

One of the fascinating aspects of platinum in the 19th century was that it was an exotic metal with properties similar to gold in atomic weight etc but had very low demand or usage. So counterfeiters used the metal to make gold coins - primarily in the Iberian countries, plated them with gold and passed them off as the real thing.

[ccg]

Interesting indeed...

[Steve D'Ippolito]

You just happened to scratch one of my favorite topics. Stand back....

 

Platinum first came to the attention of Europeans in the 1700s, in what is now Colombia. Gold panners noticed flecks of something black (in small particles platinum looks black) in the gold they had panned. If you get images of Yosemite Sam screaming "Fifty Thousand Kronkites" from this you are mistaken. Far more likely the panners were grumbling about the caca blanca that was mixed in with their oro. It had to be meticulously separated, speck by spec, from their gold. What a pain. Very little could be done with this stuff; it couldn't even be melted with the technology of the time (the melting point was too high). It was a curiosity, somewhat more valuable than silver but less so than gold.

 

The very word platinum comes from platina which is just Spanish for "little silver" (plata). The Russians, as I understand it still call it platina (платина).

 

Mint workers did find a use for it; they'd buy some platinum dust and nuggets, and exchange it for some of the gold in a melt. They could pocket the oro and the platina was cheap--in fact it was a nuisance. Platinum could not be melted with the technology of the time, but it was gold soluble; it would dissolve into the liquefied gold. The end product--gold coins adulterated (!) with platinum--was hard to tell from the pure gold product because platinum would fail to react with acids just like gold--this is where the phrase "the acid test" came from by the way. The Spanish government had to outlaw platinum, and would buy the stuff up. (I understand that the temptation of having all this fakeable gold around was too great and that later on the Spaniards adulterated their own coinage with it deliberately.)

 

Platinum was eventually discovered near the Ural mountains. Nuggets of it were found by the locals, some of whom even used them as shot in their shotguns, once they figured out it wasn't silver. (Can you imagine blowing a half ounce or more of platinum out the barrel of a shotgun?)

 

Once people had had a chance to "play" with it a bit, platinum's first industrial use was sulfuric acid boilers. They would sinter plates of the stuff (heat it as hot as they could and ram it together hoping it would stick together--this created a "sponge" platinum), and make large casks of it (using gold solder for the joints), and pour sulfuric acid solution in it, to try to concentrate it by boiling off some of the water. The acid would eat almost anything, so the choices were glass (which could shatter under pressure--you probably didn't want to be around flying glass shards and splashing sulfuric acid separately, much less at the same time), gold (horrifically expensive) or platinum (expensive still but tolerable, even with gold solder used on the joints).

 

The Russian platinum coinage was made out of sponge platinum as well, they'd run the raw material through the mines through a chemical process to try to get rid of iridium impurities (iridium was even more useless and it was a hardening agent--a bit tough on the mint presses), and eventually they'd have a solution of a platinum compound, they'd add something to it, and platinum dust would precipitate out and coat the bottom of the flask. This could be taken out of the flask then compressed under heat (work hardening it, incidentally) to create a slug of sponge platinum they could make the coins out of. The result was a dull gray metal, it never really looked shiny and lustrous (I spotted a fake 12 ruble once because it looked too lustrous). I have measured the specific gravity of two of the coins (my beat up 3 ruble which I still have, and my 6, which I sold in 2008) and in both cases the specific gravity came out lower than platinum's (21.45). I recall that the 3 ruble piece's SG was 20.5, which tells me it is probably about 5% air. [Gold comes in at 19.3, so even with five percent air, platinum is denser.] I had someone shoot it with one of those new x ray analyzers ("phasers") repeatedly at different spots (since the coin is not mixed alloy but a bunch of particles mashed together, so an impurity ought to show up as a concentrated "speck" in the coin) and the only significant impurity in it was iron, but not enough to make this kind of a difference.

 

The coins were made on planchets the same size and shape as the 1/4, 1/2, and 1 ruble coins--that cut down on the amount of retooling the Russians had to do to implement the program. The three ruble pieces did occasionally circulate, but as I understand it, the 6s and 12s got used for nothing but trade with central and eastern Asia, and they simply sent them back as soon as they could find something they wanted to buy from Russia

 

Only during the 1860s did it become possible to melt platinum in quantity, but that was after the end of the Russian Imperial platinum series. And sometime after that the catalytic properties of platinum (and the other platinum group metals, ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, and iridium) became known which sent the price straight up. Thousands of Russian platinum pieces were melted down, as well as old sulfuric acid boilers, to meet the demand.

 

Fast forward to the late 1990s and early 2000s. I bought a three ruble piece (beat up badly, bent, with two knife marks in it, probably for administering the acid test) in 1996 for an obscenely low price, located a six ruble piece a few years later, and finally managed to nab a twelve (and a more attractive 3) by the middle of 2002. I put on an exhibit with these coins, some platinum nuggets out of Siberia, and one platinum bar (the only piece of melted platinum in the whole exhibit), and took second runner up for best of show with it in New York (2002). Later after I improved my exhibiting style it became my first ANA summer show ("World's Fair of Money") best of show winner in San Francisco in 2005. I sold the three good coins in 2008, and often wished I had not. Dark gray and dull and unappealing to any magpie that they are, I "miss" them far more than anything else in that sale.

[alexbq2]

Very interesting! Thanks for posting this info!

[squirrel]

 

Sad.

Do you at least have visitation rights to your former Platinum?

[Steve D'Ippolito]

I have no idea where it went; it was in the World Wide Coins auction of November 2008. I'd imagine they are in Russia now.

[gxseries]

I do remember reading your passion about platinum coins Steve. Real shame to be honest since they have become very expensive to obtain unless you win the lottery.

 

I still have to kick myself for not buying a 3 ruble platinum coin when I had the opportunity. There was a banged up one that I could have bought for 300 dollars about 7 years ago but no, I chose to get the modern Soviet platinum, palladium and gold. If I sold all those three, maybe I could buy ONE of those 3 ruble coin.

 

 

Still doesn't really answer my question whether Goznak has such plans in 2028 or 15 years from now.

[Steve D'Ippolito]

Well I did keep my BU 3 rubles. (But BU stands for beat up!) I generally carry it around at coin shows, if I get to talking with someone it's a great show piece because the series is moderately famous but most people have never seen one.

[alexbq2]

Well I did keep my BU 3 rubles. (But BU stands for beat up!) I generally carry it around at coin shows, if I get to talking with someone it's a great show piece because the series is moderately famous but most people have never seen one.

 

I have seen it. It's pretty cool!