Process
An early and common method of coin elongation was smashing pennies by leaving them on a railroad track. When a train rolls over a penny, the force is sufficient to cause plastic deformation that flattens and stretches it into an oval, showing only the faintest trace of the original design. Some early railroad flattened cents were then hand engraved with the date and location.
Modern elongated coins are created by inserting a standard, small denomination coin into a small rolling mill consisting of two steel rollers pressed against each other with sufficient force to deform the coin. One of the rollers (called the "die") is engraved with a design that imprints a new image into the metal as the coin passes through it. The resulting coin is oval-shaped and shows a design corresponding to the design on the die in the mill.
Throughout the history of the production of elongated coins, various methods have been used to engrave the design into the roller. Early elongateds were hand engraved with burin gravers, and some are still engraved using this method. More popular modern and contemporary methods include etching, pantograph engraving, and engraving using electric or air-powered rotary tools.
In America, cents are most commonly used in these vending machines, as they are thin, easy to emboss, and are the smallest denomination of American money (Most machines charge $.50 in addition to the cent rolled). Less common are machines that press designs into quarters, dimes, and nickels.
Read more about this topic: Elongated Coin
Famous quotes containing the word process:
“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.... Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.”
—Joseph Heller (b. 1923)
“The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot foresee.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)