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Metallurgical Assay
A metallurgical assay is a compositional analysis of an ore, metal, or alloy, usually performed in order to test for purity or quality. Some assay methods are suitable for raw materials; others are more appropriate for finished goods. Raw precious metals (bullion) are assayed by an assay office. Silver is assayed by titration, gold by cupellation and platinum by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP OES). Precious metal items of art or jewelry are frequently hallmarked (depending upon the requirements of the laws of either the place of manufacture or the place of import). Where required to be hallmarked, semi-finished precious metal items of art or jewelry pass through the official testing channels where they are analyzed or assayed for precious metal content. While different nations permit a variety of legally acceptable finenesses, the assayer is actually testing to determine that the fineness of the product conforms with the statement or claim of f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tombstone Courthouse Assay Lab
A gravestone or tombstone is a marker, usually stone, that is placed over a grave. A marker set at the head of the grave may be called a headstone. An especially old or elaborate stone slab may be called a funeral stele, stela, or slab. The use of such markers is traditional for Chinese burial, Chinese, Jewish burial, Jewish, Christian burial, Christian, and Islamic burial, Islamic burials, as well as other traditions. In East Asia, the tomb's spirit tablet is the focus for Chinese ancestral veneration, ancestral veneration and may be removable for greater protection between rituals. Ancient grave markers typically incorporated funerary art, especially details in stone relief. With greater literacy, more markers began to include inscriptions of the deceased's name, date of birth, and date of death, often along with a personal message or prayer. The presence of a frame for photographs of the deceased is also increasingly common. Use The stele (plural: stelae), as it is called ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bullion
Bullion is non-ferrous metal that has been refined to a high standard of elemental purity. The term is ordinarily applied to bulk metal used in the production of coins and especially to precious metals such as gold and silver. It comes from the Anglo-Norman term for a melting-house where metal was refined, and earlier from French , "boiling". Although precious metal bullion is no longer used to make coins for general circulation, it continues to be held as an investment with a reputation for stability in periods of economic uncertainty. To assess the purity of gold bullion, the centuries-old technique of fire assay is still employed, together with modern spectroscopic instrumentation, to accurately determine its quality. As investment The specifications of bullion are often regulated by market bodies or legislation. In the European Union, the minimum purity for gold to be referred to as "bullion", which is treated as investment gold with regard to taxation, is 99.5% for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Coins
A coin is a small object, usually round and flat, used primarily as a medium of exchange or legal tender. They are standardized in weight, and produced in large quantities at a mint in order to facilitate trade. They are most often issued by a government. Coins often have images, numerals, or text on them. The faces of coins or medals are sometimes called the ''obverse'' and the ''reverse'', referring to the front and back sides, respectively. The obverse of a coin is commonly called ''heads'', because it often depicts the head of a prominent person, and the reverse is known as ''tails''. The first metal coins – invented in the ancient Greek world and disseminated during the Hellenistic period – were precious metal–based, and were invented in order to simplify and regularize the task of measuring and weighing bullion (bulk metal) carried around for the purpose of transactions. They carried their value within the coins themselves, but the stampings also induced manipu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Trial Of The Pyx
The Trial of the Pyx () is a judicial ceremony in the United Kingdom to ensure that newly minted coins from the Royal Mint conform to their required dimensional and fineness specifications. Although coin quality is now tested throughout the year under laboratory conditions, the event has become an annual historic tradition. Each year, thousands of coins are put on trial, consisting of both those struck for circulation and non-circulating commemorative coins. First held in the 12th century, the event takes place in the hall of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths in London, where the Deputy Master of the Mint (Chief Executive of the Royal Mint) is in effect put on trial before a High Court judge as metallurgical assayers and selected leaders from the financial world sample coins from the mint's output. The boxes in which coins are stored form the ceremony's namesake: the word '' pyx'' derives from the Greek meaning 'wooden box'. History According to records from the Dialog ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Perth Mint
The Perth Mint is Australia's official bullion mint and wholly owned by the Government of Western Australia. Established on 20 June 1899, two years before Australia's Federation in 1901, the Perth Mint was the last of three Australian colonial branches of the United Kingdom's Royal Mint (after the now-defunct Sydney Mint and Melbourne Mint) intended to refine gold from the gold rushes and to mint gold sovereigns and half-sovereigns for the British Empire. Along with the Royal Australian Mint, which produces coins of the Australian dollar for circulation, the Perth Mint is the older of Australia's two mints issuing coins that are legal tender. History Perth Mint, as a business entity, was established during the 1890s, as a subsidiary of the Royal Mint in the United Kingdom. The foundation stone of the Mint building was laid in 1896 by John Forrest. The building was officially opened on 20 June 1899. At that time, the population of Western Australia (WA) was growing rapi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brass
Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc, in proportions which can be varied to achieve different colours and mechanical, electrical, acoustic and chemical properties, but copper typically has the larger proportion, generally copper and zinc. In use since prehistoric times, it is a substitutional alloy: atoms of the two constituents may replace each other within the same crystal structure. Brass is similar to bronze, a copper alloy that contains tin instead of zinc. Both bronze and brass may include small proportions of a range of other Chemical element, elements including arsenic, lead, phosphorus, aluminium, manganese and silicon. Historically, the distinction between the two alloys has been less consistent and clear, and increasingly museums use the more general term "list of copper alloys, copper alloy". Brass has long been a popular material for its bright gold-like appearance and is still used for drawer pulls and door handle, doorknobs. It has also been widely used to ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cupro-nickel
Cupronickel or copper–nickel (CuNi) is an alloy of copper with nickel, usually along with small quantities of other metals added for strength, such as iron and manganese. The copper content typically varies from 60 to 90 percent. ( Monel is a nickel–copper alloy that contains a minimum of 52 percent nickel.) Despite its high copper content, cupronickel is silver in colour. Cupronickel is highly resistant to corrosion by salt water, and is therefore used for piping, heat exchangers and condensers in seawater systems, as well as for marine hardware. It is sometimes used for the propellers, propeller shafts, and hulls of high-quality boats. Other uses include military equipment and chemical industry, petrochemical industry, and electrical industries. In decorative use, a cupronickel alloy called nickel silver is common, although it contains additional zinc but no silver. Another common 20th-century use of cupronickel was silver-coloured coins. For this use, the typical a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Silver
Silver is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Ag () and atomic number 47. A soft, whitish-gray, lustrous transition metal, it exhibits the highest electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, and reflectivity of any metal. Silver is found in the Earth's crust in the pure, free elemental form ("native metal, native silver"), as an alloy with gold and other metals, and in minerals such as argentite and chlorargyrite. Most silver is produced as a byproduct of copper, gold, lead, and zinc Refining (metallurgy), refining. Silver has long been valued as a precious metal. Silver metal is used in many bullion coins, sometimes bimetallism, alongside gold: while it is more abundant than gold, it is much less abundant as a native metal. Its purity is typically measured on a per-mille basis; a 94%-pure alloy is described as "0.940 fine". As one of the seven metals of antiquity, silver has had an enduring role in most human cultures. Other than in currency and as an in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gold
Gold is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol Au (from Latin ) and atomic number 79. In its pure form, it is a brightness, bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile metal. Chemically, gold is a transition metal, a group 11 element, and one of the noble metals. It is one of the least reactivity (chemistry), reactive chemical elements, being the second-lowest in the reactivity series. It is solid under standard temperature and pressure, standard conditions. Gold often occurs in free elemental (native state (metallurgy), native state), as gold nugget, nuggets or grains, in rock (geology), rocks, vein (geology), veins, and alluvial deposits. It occurs in a solid solution series with the native element silver (as in electrum), naturally alloyed with other metals like copper and palladium, and mineral inclusions such as within pyrite. Less commonly, it occurs in minerals as gold compounds, often with tellurium (gold tellurides). Gold is resistant to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Coin
A coin is a small object, usually round and flat, used primarily as a medium of exchange or legal tender. They are standardized in weight, and produced in large quantities at a mint in order to facilitate trade. They are most often issued by a government. Coins often have images, numerals, or text on them. The faces of coins or medals are sometimes called the ''obverse'' and the ''reverse'', referring to the front and back sides, respectively. The obverse of a coin is commonly called ''heads'', because it often depicts the head of a prominent person, and the reverse is known as ''tails''. The first metal coins – invented in the ancient Greek world and disseminated during the Hellenistic period – were precious metal–based, and were invented in order to simplify and regularize the task of measuring and weighing bullion (bulk metal) carried around for the purpose of transactions. They carried their value within the coins themselves, but the stampings also induced manip ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mint (coin)
A mint is an industrial facility which manufactures coins that can be used as currency. The history of mints correlates closely with the history of coins. In the beginning, hammered coinage or cast coinage were the chief means of coin minting, with resulting production runs numbering as little as the hundreds or thousands. In modern mints, coin dies are manufactured in large numbers and planchets are made into milled coins by the billions. With the mass production of currency, the production cost is weighed when minting coins. For example, it costs the United States Mint much less than 25 cents to make a quarter (a 25 cent coin), and the difference in production cost and face value (called seigniorage) helps fund the minting body. Conversely, a U.S. penny ($0.01) cost $0.015 to make in 2016. History The first minted coins The first mint was likely established in Lydia in the 7th century BC, for coining gold, silver and electrum. The first coins known to be minted on E ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
