99% Invisible
Hosted by Roman Mars
Billions of state quarters disappeared from circulation...and that was exactly the plan.
8,095 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
This fall, L.L. Bean is celebrating the moments people look forward to all year. The first school drop-off, the first sweater-weather day, and the first chilly evening around the fire pit. For over 100 years, L.L. Bean has been part of these traditions: crunching leaves in Maine-made Bean boots, cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel, and walking the dog in a rugged field coat. So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. L.L. Bean: Being an Outsider. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on the things you love,
like those iced lattes that help you get ready to face the day. So switch your home and auto to Progressive and see if you could save and keep stepping away. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.
99% Invisible is presented by Acura. Curating and designing the perfect experience takes meticulous craft, an obsession with detail, and a love for innovation. Just like museum designers, Acura carefully considers every detail to curate the most engaging, exhilarating, and rewarding experience for drivers. That craft isn't always something you can see, but it's something you'll feel, that flutter in your heart when the engine roars. Every Acura is designed with deliberate intention around how people actually use the vehicles. And that is precision-crafted performance. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.
This past February, the American Numismatic Association held its annual convention at the Savannah Convention Center in Savannah, Georgia.
Six o'clock today.
For the uninitiated, numismatics is the fancy word for coins and the study of coins.
Okay, massive room. There are dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of vendors.
And that's reporter and novice numismatist Katie Thornton.
This was my first time at a coin show, but right away I could tell that this convention was not necessarily catering to the merely coin curious. More than anything, this show was for collectors, mostly of US coins, with each booth featuring something for which there was some kind of small but extremely avid fandom.
These gold pieces were made with gold from the California Gold Rush.
We're specialists in what's called three-cent silvers or trimes.
These are half dimes. Have you ever heard of a half dime?
I have now. There was also a society dedicated to crushed pennies, like when the machines smooshed the pennies, or as they call them, elongateds.
Why do we stop on pennies? You give me a foreign currency and we'll smash it and see how lovely the design comes out.
But Katie wasn't on the hunt for anything quite so niche. Instead, she was in Savannah to learn about what has to be the most widely collected coin in American history.
So I'm of the age where my sort of introduction to coin collecting was the state quarters. Do you have any you could show me?
Oh, yeah.
Of course, everyone in America knows about state quarters. Chances are you have one hiding in your couch cushion right now.
From 1999 until 2009, the US Mint issued 56 special quarter designs, one for each state and territory and Washington DC.
They put billions of these special quarters into circulation. On the front, you'll see the classic profile of George Washington, but turn any of them over and you'll see an engraving of something that some state or territory likes about itself. The quarter from my home state of Minnesota features a loon. Kansas has a bison. And Illinois, well, it couldn't decide. So it has Lincoln kind of framed by the outline of the state with the Sears Tower in the background.
Somewhat awkwardly, two different state quarters featured the Wright Brothers Flyer because the first modern airplane was built in Ohio, but it was flown in North Carolina.
But the state quarters series is more than just a bunch of cool designs on the back of some coins. Yeah, when they first came out, if you were like me, you probably thought, hey, cute, a fun little thing the government did just for the hell of it. But that's just not true. In reality, just beneath its shiny metal surface, the state quarters initiative was a high stakes government program, one in which coin collecting played a critical role.
Because it turns out the Mint didn't spend all those years creating billions of new coins just for the sake of civic pride. Instead, the state quarters were developed for the express purpose of getting us to collect them and to turn a healthy profit for the US government.
Today, the story of how the US makes money off of making money and how it makes even more if you collect.
In many ways, the Mint's state quarters program is the product of a series of innovations in American currency, starting with the invention of the quarter itself. Because for the first 200 years of colonial history, America didn't even have a standard system of denomination.
So the earliest coins that were used in the earliest settlements of what became the United States were literally the coins that settlers brought in their pockets.
Jesse Kraft is an assistant curator at the American Numerismatic Society, not the American Numerismatic Association, which put on the coin show, a different numerismatic group, and he focuses on American coins.
The first boats that came over actually had a lot of German settlers as well, so there's a good mix of German coins, English coins, of course, Spanish, American coins.
Soon, coins from all over the world made their way into the colonies. English shillings, Portuguese joes, German tollers. It was chaotic. It's not like the exchange rate for these things was one to one.
But Kraft says there is one thing making it easier. In those days, coins were made almost entirely of rare precious metals like gold, or more often, silver. That meant that no matter what country the coin was from, its value was determined by its metal content. How much gold or silver was in there.
So each piece was weighed to check its gold weight. And because the different coins had different weights, and wore down, even just like a little bit of friction on a gold coin would actually affect its value.
And if that sounds impractical, well, it often was. Imagine trying to buy a herd of sheep, only to find that the precious silver coin you'd had in your satchel this whole time was too worn down to pay for it all. Complicating things further, there were never enough of these random worn-down coins making their way into the colonies for everyone to use in the first place. So the colonists also had to use something else as money.
One of the first pieces of money that was legislated as legal tender was actually corn.
Corn, wheat, and barley were all literally used as money, with an exchange rate just like any other currency. In 1631, for example, one bushel of corn had the same spending power as six English shillings.
They even accepted corn for payment in taxes. That's how legal it was. Like, this is money.
Eventually, though, people got tired of buying their cows with a combination of random European denominations, plus a bunch of bulky loose grain. So after the United States won its independence, its leaders finally decided that we might want to make our own standardized monetary system.
It was at that point Jefferson wrote his now-famous Notes on Coinage.
Oh yeah, so famous.
A very simple name, but it kind of redefined everything.
Jefferson basically says, hey, British money is confusing. A pence is one 240th of a pound. A farthing is one 960th. Spanish money, though, it uses easy, common-sense fractions. Haves, quarters. That's what we should do.
So in 1792, the US Mint began making dollar coins, named for the Spanish dólar, as the United States' base unit.
Just like their Spanish predecessors, dollar coins were made of silver. And early on, the Mint made gold coins, too. They were called eagles. That's literally the name of the coin. Silver dollars and gold eagles. An eagle was worth $10.
So these are half eagles, these $5 pieces.
This is Caroline Turco. She is a curator at the American Numeratic Association. I ran into her at the coin show in Savannah, where she showed me these old gold coins.
So it's based on weight. So the $5 half eagles here are $5 worth of gold, give or take a few cents at that time to consider the amount of work and money it took to make it. And then the smaller ones, they're a quarter eagle, and they are worth $2.5 worth of gold.
And silver coins worked pretty much the same way, which is to say, the way they do today. Dollars, half dollars, and of course, quarters.
But beyond just standardizing the denominations, the early US Mint faced another equally important numismatic task. It had to decide what our coins would look like.
Only, these first designs were nothing like our modern state quarters. Instead of dozens of elaborate variations, early US coins only featured a small number of very simple, some would say, boring motifs. And deliberately so. That's because the Mint used design in part to guard against counterfeiting. By making engravings clean, simple, and consistent, you could easily spot any deviation.
One of the reasons why they wanted to keep the designs so similar was if they all had minor, minor differences, then a counterfeiter could create another coin with a minor difference that would just kind of be accepted.
All these counterfeiting countermeasures required that the first US coins all looked pretty much the same. And thanks to our first president, they didn't even have any real faces on them.
The first US Mint, they go to George Washington, and they say, "Sir, we're going to need your bust to be made so that we can have your face on coins." But he says, "Absolutely not, because that is for a monarchy." And George is like, "We literally just fought a war to get rid of our monarch. How dare you try to make me into that same symbol?" And he said, "Over my dead body." Which, by the way, if you've seen a quarter recently, awkward.
But even more than the concern over counterfeiting or Washington's living body, it was the technology of the time that limited the design of these early coins.
Engravers in the 19th century had to carve designs by hand into a tiny steel stamp called a die, using even tinier little chisel tools. They didn't have electric lights, so they were doing this outside or in a window, or straining their eyes in candlelight. Then they'd have to either put some metal under the die and hammer the image onto the coin to be, or stamp the design onto the coin with a press powered by human muscle, or horses, or eventually steam. Not easy.
The first human figure allowed on a US coin was Lady Liberty. But given the technological constraints, the mint's engravers quickly discovered there wasn't much you could do with her.
Initially, it was mostly her head, her head in profile with flowing hair. Later, her hair was tied up with a ribbon. Eventually, they figured out how to get her whole body on there. But even so, the coin designs from year to year were pretty bland. Until, finally, in 1904.
President Theodore Roosevelt said, "Hey, our coinage is ugly."
He actually described the design of American coins as atrocious hideousness.
He was not playing around. And Theodore Roosevelt was like, "I want good stuff again."
Luckily, at some point during Teddy's tantrum, he made a specific demand. "The US Mint," he urged, "should import a near miraculous new device that had recently been invented in France." It was called the Jeanvier Reduction Machine.
Essentially, you could sculpt a large-sized coin, you know, sometimes two and three feet in diameter, you know, quote-unquote "coin." And then you could put this design onto the Jeanvier Reduction Machine, and it would have this little stylus, and just slowly, slowly go over the design, and at the same exact time, engrave that design onto a die the actual size of the coin.
Oh, so cool.
The Jeanvier machine allowed the mint to mass-produce coins with a level of detail that would have been impossible before. Suddenly, Lady Liberty could do more things.
Starting in the early 1900s, you got Liberty walking towards a rising sun, Liberty ascending a mountain with a Capitol dome in the background, Liberty with a winged Fringian cap with a beautiful column wrapped in a vining olive plant on the other side. This aesthetic revolution in US currency has been termed "the American Renaissance of coins."
It even led to an explosion in special commemorative coin designs in the 1930s for things like the Texas Centennial and the opening of the Bay Bridge, to the point that the whole thing actually got kind of out of hand.
There is one commemorative coin that was made to have a living person on it. It was an Alabama senator.
It's Alabama, why?
Because he wanted his face on a coin.
But the ability to put almost anything you wanted on a coin was not enough on its own to pave the way for the state quarters program. For that to happen, US coins would need to undergo one more critical transformation, this time to their metal content.
Remember, up until this point, silver coins were still made of silver. They had that inherent metal value. But in the 1960s, that ended. President Lyndon Johnson got rid of all of our pretty shiny silver coins and replaced them with something called clad coins.
In clad coinage, a piece of low-cost, kind-of-ugly metal is clad in a thin layer of something a little bit prettier. It's a much cheaper way to make a coin. So in 1965, looking for ways to save money, Johnson convinced Congress to stop putting silver in coins. Instead, he had them minted from copper and then covered in nickel. They were nicknamed "Johnson Sandwiches."
Jesse Kraft says that prior to this, if a national government ever debased its currency, they would only dare to do it very gradually, changing the coin's metal content a little at a time over the course of decades.
LBJ, God bless him, just went ahead and did it all at once.
1964, literally, all the coins are silver. 1965, none of them are silver. So it kind of like created valueless coins. So it's actually one of the most significant things that's ever happened since perhaps the beginning of coins themselves, and no one seemed to care.
And it's true. No one really cared. Everyone just carried on as if we were all still lugging these little pieces of silver around and continued spending and accepting US coins like nothing had changed.
But for the Mint, everything had changed because this strange metallurgical bait and switch meant that suddenly, a coin like a quarter costs way less than a quarter to make. And that discrepancy between the production cost of the coin and its face value allowed the Mint to engage in a money-making scheme beloved by governments the world over. It's called seniorage.
OK, seniorage. It's really a simple concept.
This is Philip Deal. These days, he's the president of US Money Reserve, a coin seller. A few decades ago, though, he was director of the US Mint. And he says, to understand seniorage, you have to think of the Mint as a business, a business whose product is coins.
And that is, like any product in business, you hope to produce it at a cost that is less than what you sell it for.
So the goal for the Mint is to make coins as cheaply as possible, but to still sell them at their face value so that they can turn a profit, just like any other product.
When you do that with coins, that's called seniorage.
So seniorage is the profit the mint makes from selling a coin for more than it cost to produce it. Like Philip said, simple.
Now, if you're wondering who would be stupid enough to pay 25 cents for a coin that only costs a few cents to make, well, you are, and me too.
And me. We all end up paying full face value for these coins, thanks to a chain of sale that starts with the mint's largest customer, the independent Federal Reserve Bank.
Which, just for clarity, operates independently of the federal government.
The Federal Reserve, they pay us the face value of the coin, and then those coins are distributed to the regional Federal Reserve Banks. And the regional Federal Reserve Banks then take orders from the banking system in the United States, and the coins are delivered to the banks.
Let me translate, at the risk of making this part a little too simple. The mint makes coins, again, let's say quarters, as cheaply as it can. The banks then buy those quarters at face value from the mint. Businesses buy quarters at face value from banks. And when we get change from the cash registers at those businesses, we get those quarters. So everyone in that sequence, banks, businesses, people, pay 25 cents for something that the mint originally made for much, much less.
Once a quarter gets old and worn out, the US government can end up buying it back and recycling the metal. But that can take a long time.
And that coin might have circulated for 30 years. And so, for us, the mint, that coin is basically like a 30-year, long-term loan, interest-free.
So in the end, the only one turning a profit is the US government. But the truth is, this approach only worked well for a little while.
When the US first started making significant seniorage off of coins in the 1960s, it was a good bet. The difference between the production cost and the sales price ensured that the Mint made about 4.5 cents off of every nickel, 9.5 cents off of every dime, and 24 cents off of every quarter. Even the penny made a little bit of money. But as the price of metals like copper rose, so did the cost of making coins. As early as 1974, the cost of making the penny was already approaching its face value.
So the Mint futzed with the metal ratios again, just trying to make this thing for even cheaper. They upped the zinc and lowered the copper, which, again, worked at first, but not for long. So when Philip Diehl became the director of the US Mint in 1994, one of his main goals was to stop and ideally reverse this decline.
And so, when I was director of the Mint 30 years ago, I was the first Mint director to recommend the elimination of the penny. And it was long overdue then.
Unfortunately, Philip did not have the necessary sway to kill the penny. America would have to wait for someone else to make that one happen.
But there was another more exciting idea to boost seniorage that was being bounced around the Mint at the same time. A scheme to increase the sales of one of their biggest earners: the quarter.
And after a couple of years, I started thinking about whether or not it was possible. And I became convinced we could do it.
At that time, in the mid-'90s, every quarter, thanks to its high face value, was still netting the Mint about 22 cents in seniorage. And every year, some of those quarters would fall out of circulation. People lost them, accidentally threw them out, or put them in coin jars in the car. Which meant every year, the banks had to ask the Mint for more quarters to replace all those missing coins, make up the gap, and ensure that the country didn't run out of change.
That, of course, was good for the US government because selling more quarters to the banks generated more seniorage for the Mint. But what if there was a way to get people to take even more quarters out of circulation every year? Well, one way was to convince people to start collecting them.
Only, the Mint couldn't just rely on hardcore collectors, like the ones I met at the convention, to get the job done. The idea was to take billions of dollars' worth of quarters out of circulation. If it was ever going to do that, the Mint would somehow have to convince ordinary people, people who rarely even thought about quarters, to start collecting them, too.
And what better way to encourage ordinary Americans to start collecting quarters than by issuing a bunch of special designs? Say, 50 of them.
And so, I'm sort of famous there for having created the 50-state Quarters Program.
Sneaky, perhaps. Elaborate? Sure. Profitable? Definitely.
The idea had been circling among coin fans for years. Canada's Mint had already done something similar, and it made money. But Philip couldn't just order the Mint to make a bunch of new designs. After all, the Mint, by this point, had been stamping quarters with the same design of George Washington in profile since 1932. Making lots of new designs required lots more resources. To make the state quarters program happen, the Mint needed an advocate in Washington. So Philip went to a congressman from Delaware, named Mike Castle, and laid out his idea.
I said, "Now, this has tremendous education potential. Each one of the 50 states will have designs emblematic of the state. People in the state, and students will become excited about it."
Philip told him there was no way they could do all these coins in one year. He was thinking they'd roll them out five a year for a decade. But he didn't just want to release them alphabetically.
That's boring. We're not teaching anybody anything.
Instead, Philip suggested to the congressman from Delaware that they release the coins in the order that the states ratified the Constitution.
And it just so happened that Delaware is the first state.
And I knew that I could sell him on that with that line. And man, he bought. And he became such a champion of that. And I needed a champion.
The Mint needed the Treasury's approval, and the Treasury at the time did not like the idea. Too many things could go wrong. They wanted a study done.
Everybody in Washington knows that studies are designed to kill proposals. It's just, it always.
So the Treasury ran some numbers. Philip and his colleagues did too. How much seniorage each quarter would net the government? And also, how many additional quarters they would get to sell to the banks due to people collecting them and taking them out of circulation.
We looked at what's going to be the incremental increase in demand for quarters from people who want to pull them out of circulation and collect them. And the models came up with a range of 2.6 billion to 3.5 billion.
In other words, the amount of quarters people took out and kept in their private collection would generate the government at least $2.6 billion in profit.
And the Treasury ended up recommending the program. And man, was the Deputy Secretary, I was at that meeting, and the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury was hot when his handpicked committee made that recommendation.
Congress gave the Mint the go-ahead in late 1997. And just over a year later, in 1999, the state quarters went live.
Hi, Hall Kermit the Frog here, announcing the new 50 state quarters from the United States Mint. We employed Kermit the Frog. I wanted Kermit because he was the perfect spokes frog for our product because the appeal was so broad. Each quarter tells something about the state it represents. This one's New Jersey.
It was the first time in decades that there was any significant change made to a US coin. And it was exciting.
Incredible buzz. 50 state quarters from the United States Mint, the most
...exciting change America's ever seen. Philip and his team had done their research. They knew people loved the treasure hunt aspect of collecting. So they worked that into the program.
All US coins have mint marks, little letters on the front indicating at which mint the coin was made. So they made sure every state quarter bore one of two mint marks, P for the Philadelphia mint, or D for Denver, so people would have twice as many coins to collect.
The states especially loved it. Governors got their constituents involved, submitting design concepts and voting on their favorites.
And that was a brilliant marketing move because you had all this free, earned publicity as each state's coin was coming up for production. And people would anxiously await the coins are released.
That is true. If you were around when the state quarters first debuted, like I was, you will remember this. They were like the weather. Everyone talked about them all the time. Everyone.
Kids loved it. Their parents loved it. We figured teenagers wouldn't care a bit. I mean, you know, we were competing with computer games. You know, how can coins compete with that? Hugely successful with teenagers, too. In fact, I remember standing in lines of music concerts or restaurants and being around teenagers and young 20-year-olds who'd be talking about the quarters.
And at times, it seemed like almost everyone collected them, or at least would hold on to a few of their favorites. To this day, I am loathe to part with a Connecticut quarter. I mean, have you seen this thing? It is gorgeous.
Soon, the private market was cashing in on it, too, selling all sorts of accessories. Are you like me and my family, collecting the new US quarters? Problem is, where do you put them?
USA Coin Collection Album. You'll receive this unique map which features a face to hold each quarter. Now you can have the perfect way to proudly display your collection with the America's 50 state quarters wooden frame. Due to overwhelming demand for these quarters, this is a limited offer for a limited time. You must act now, but wait. Order within the next 10 minutes and we'll include a special bonus, our 50 state fax book filled with exciting information about each state. Call now.
As planned, the coins rolled out five a year for 10 years. They made nearly 35 billion of these quarters.
Sadly, a stack of 35 billion quarters is not tall enough to reach the moon. We checked. Sorry. You're just going to imagine a lot of quarters.
The program was so popular that after a decade of releases, the Mint extended the run an extra year and added the territories.
By the end, so many quarters had gone out of circulation that the banking system had to purchase more than twice as many quarters as it had in the 10 years before the initiative. That increase in demand netted the Mint by conservative estimates $2.6 billion, just as Philip's team had originally predicted.
Am I understanding correctly that that was from the seniorage alone?
Yes.
Wow.
Those quarters, those circulating quarters, were in huge demand and were taken out of circulation. And that's where that $2.6 billion come from.
That money went back into the Treasury's general fund, which went to lowering the tax burden and paying down the national debt. It was a huge victory and it turned a whole generation onto the magic of coins, including Caroline Turco.
I remember like when the state quarters came out. I was interested for the very first time. And you know, here in this show, I have, this is my sixth show and I've never seen the US Mint this busy. Never.
In the past year, coins have been in the headlines. The US finally stopped producing the penny, RIP. We have new coin designs that honor the US's 250th. Coins whose images paint a very specific and perhaps overly generous view of early American history with designs of pilgrims and the Mayflower. But these coins will be around for a long time, and love them or hate them, they are probably gonna get some folks hooked on coin collecting. That's good for the Mint, but they're not the only ones who want to see the hobby live on.
Every year, the ANA, who puts on the coin show, encourages collectors to do the apparent opposite of what the Mint intended and put some of the more unusual coins back into circulation. But really, it's just their own way of piquing people's interest. If you ever come across an old standing Liberty Quarter or a Wheat Penny, there's a good chance you have a collector to thank for it. At which point, you get to decide, what's this coin worth to you?
Ultimately, the state quarters program did something similar, just on a much bigger scale. It got so many of us feeling sentimental about these little hunks of copper and nickel, not just the coin nerds. I didn't have a set of state quarters, but my neighbor did. He had a book and everything. And when I found a state quarter, I'd gasp, put it in my pocket, and run over to Andy's house to see if he had Wisconsin yet. He always had Wisconsin. He always had whatever I found. But together, we took plenty of quarters out of circulation. The state quarters turned us all into numismatists. It put the collecting bug in all of us, at least a little bit.
So when I was in Savannah, I bought a coin, minted just a stone's throw away from beautiful uptown Oakland, California.
It's an S San Francisco mint quarter, so it's never been in circulation.
I've learned in the coin world that when people say it's in mint condition, they mean it literally. Like, someone got this from the mint and it never made the rounds. This one was made in 1951. That means it's almost all silver and it has this really nice, bright sheen. But if you just glanced at this coin casually, there's a good chance you wouldn't think anything of it. I wouldn't have, just a few months ago.
I think I'd like to get this never circulated one from 1951. Okay. Okay. I got this quarter for $20. That's $4 over the intrinsic value. $19.75 over the face value. But I'm not planning on holding on to it for long. Call me a sucker, but I think this coin, this little piece of history, deserves to be out in the wild. You're gonna put it in circulation? I'm thinking I might. Okay. Just to see if, to just think about somebody picking it up down the line. Absolutely, that's cool. Okay, let's do it. All right. Funny question, but do you take cash?
When we return, the story of one state quarter that might not have been worth it.
This episode is presented by Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort from start to finish. Enjoy priority check-in and boarding, followed by access to peaceful lounges. Onboard, savor menus created by renowned French chefs, paired with wines and champagne selected by sommelier. Stay connected with free high-speed Wi-Fi. Then unwind in a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with a mattress topper developed with Sofitel My Bed, a signature touch of French hospitality. The art of travel elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional.
This fall, LL Bean is celebrating the moments people look forward to all year. The first school drop off, the first sweater weather day, and the first chilly evening around the fire pit. For over 100 years, LL Bean has been part of these traditions. Crunching leaves in Maine-made Bean boots, cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel, and walking the dog in a rugged field coat. So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, be an outsider. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than
cutting down on the things you love, like those iced lattes that help you get ready to face the day. So switch your home and auto to Progressive and see if you could save and keep sipping away. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. If you're a small business, the right hire can be make or break. Indeed sponsored jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status
it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. So we're back with Katie Thornton. Hey Katie.
Hey, Rauman.
So we talked about how the state quarters program works and how they made money for the government, but I hear you have a story about the design of the quarters.
Yes, I have a story of an adventure, or maybe a misadventure in state quarter design. But before we get there, I want to just look at all the quarter designs really quick. I sent you a link that has all of the special quarters.
Yes. Okay, I see them all arrayed in front of me, all 50?
Fifty-six.
Fifty-six. Don't forget DC and the Territories. We've got them all. So if you open them up, I mean, do any stick out to you?
Let's see, I like, I like the bison on Kansas quite a bit.
I like the bison. One strong image.
Yeah, yeah. It's clear that the ones that work the best are kind of trying to put together one cohesive image. Like Florida has like a, like a ship and like the space shuttle and some palm trees and stuff. And it just looks like a weird patchwork of clip art, you know? And that, that, that is not doing it for me.
Yeah, I, I agree. And I think it sort of makes me think about flag design a little bit in that, you know, you want to sort of strive for cleanness and simplicity, sort of like communicating a clear message in as few images as you can.
Yeah, no, I think that there's some, there's some similarities. I think the differences are that, you know, quarters are meant to be enjoyed, you know, looking at up close. Engraving is a real fine, detailed art form. So yeah, I'm, I'm open to these being much more complicated. I do like them to have a kind of cohesive, I don't know, composition and feel to them. I think that's the main thing. But like, there's just something about them that's just lovely.
I agree.
Yeah.
But Roman, I wanted to tell you about one person who I interviewed, who really did not like the design of one of these quarters, Missouri.
Missouri, okay, okay. Let me, let me pull up Missouri and see if I can get a gander of Missouri.
Yeah, for those of us who are not, you know, familiar with the design of the Missouri State Quarter, do you, will you give us a little description?
Yeah, sure. It has the gateway arch there and has trees. So there's sort of anachronistic combination of the arch and trees and what looks like a depiction of the Lewis and Clark expedition. So it looks like that's kind of their claim to fame with this quarter is the, the beginning of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Yeah, right. So it's sort of like a handful of different things that are iconically Missouri.
Yeah, it's definitely not like hideous.
No.
But the person who was really upset about this coin design was the artist who submitted the original design concept. His name is Paul Jackson and he's a well-known watercolor painter in Columbia, Missouri. And here's how he describes that coin.
My original design was sort of an elegant symbol. It had two people in a canoe and it had the arch, you know, sort of fading into the mist in the background.
I mean, that sounds like in the spirit of what we're looking at. So what is the problem? Like, what did they change that he doesn't like?
Well, yeah, I mean, the overall design concept stayed the same. But Paul says the devil is in the details. Like, take the arch, for example.
In the US Mint's version, it looks like it's crossing the river from Illinois to Missouri, and it's shaped like a McDonald's french fry bent over. It's very misshapen.
Well, I mean, it looks like an arch, but maybe it's not a factually accurate arch. I could understand this is like the issues with depicting things on coins. But does he have other issues with the design?
Yes, he certainly does.
Instead of two guys in a canoe, it had three, Larry, Moe, and Curly. They're going downhill, upriver, and the arch crosses the river from Illinois to Missouri. Plus, the trees are made of broccoli.
Plus, the trees are made of broccoli.
OK, so he doesn't like the way the trees are drawn, which I, when you say that they look like broccoli, they do look like broccoli. I can see what he's talking about. So, you know, how did these changes get included into the final design based off of his original painting?
Yeah, so Paul submitted his original design for the Missouri State Quarter Contest to the First Lady's Office, which was running the competition back in 2001. He had collected coins as a kid, and he thought his design would be a cool way to honor the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. So he was really stoked when he won. And for a while, not much happened. He says he didn't hear anything. But then, in the spring of the following year, he got a message.
I got the first email from someone in Georgia saying, "What do you think about what the US Mint did to your state quarter design?" And at that point, I had no idea. I didn't know what the US Mint had done to my state quarter design.
The Mint's design looked kind of like Paul's, but Paul and others thought it was just really ugly.
There was clearly something wrong. They dumbed it down to the point where it was unacceptable. It was just unusable. And they misspelled the word bicentennial.
Well, they must have fixed that, right?
I would hope so, but they did eventually just get rid of that word altogether.
Well, good. Did they offer any explanation as to why the design changed and like, you know, what the redesign process was like?
Yeah, you know, Paul says he didn't get much from them. The Mint said it was uncoinnable, and they said that Paul didn't understand like metal flow and things like this.
Oh, sure.
And I guess multiple private mints who make, you know, special tokens and things like that, reached out to him and they were like, oh, this is coinable. We would love to make it.
Huh, huh.
But, but Paul says, you know, from the Mint, they just sort of sprung these, these design changes on him.
Wow. Paul doesn't seem like he was a person that was gonna let this go.
No, he was not going to let this go. He was not going down without a fight.
So I gathered a few of my supporters and went to protest. And so I put out the call on AOL and invited anybody who was upset about it to join me at the State Capitol. And about 50 people showed up. They all had little signs. The US Mint lied. They've stolen state pride, things like that.
I mean, I love this scene so much, but did the protest like actually accomplish anything?
Well, it would have been a dud because what Paul didn't realize was that the state legislature wasn't actually in session at the time. But one thing that Paul did at this protest was he took about 20 quarters, just normal quarters, because, you know, at this point, the Missouri state quarter hadn't actually come out yet. They'd just been publicizing the design. And he printed up some round stickers with his Missouri quarter design on it, and he stuck it on the tail side of these 20 or so quarters.
And the next morning...
I was dead asleep and got a phone call from somebody at the Kansas City Star. And this reporter said, how does it feel to be under Secret Service investigation for defacing money? And the first word out of my mouth was awesome.
That's how you felt?
Yep. Because I knew at that moment, we had gotten traction. So I printed 250,000 more stickers and I put them on the back of 250,000 quarters.
Whoa. Really?
I mean, that's Paul's telling of it. That's more than $60,000 in quarters.
Yo.
He said, sometimes they would just go to the bank and get rolls of quarters and sticker them up and then return them to the bank.
Amazing.
I mean, he's like, there's quite a lot of dedication here. But he didn't just return them all to the bank. Like, he would also use them to sort of continue his protest, to bring his protest to a broader sphere.
So we took the show on the road and went to DC. And spent nothing but rolls of stickered quarters for gas, food, and lodging the entire way.
That is amazing. That is amazing. I love that the coin collector types put things into circulation to make a point.
Totally. I agree. I had to double down and clarify this with him. Like, hold on, nothing but quarters? You paid for your hotel room in quarters? Not once, but every night and gas?
And also, they didn't just do that. When they got to DC, they rolled this giant, four-foot diameter foam quarter with his design from the White House to the US Mint. And the press did love this.
An artist from Columbia, Missouri, is upset that the US Mint has rejected his design for the state quarter. He's protesting by putting stickers with his design on the back of real quarters. Today, he'll be handing out those sticker-covered quarters in front of the US
Treasury building here in Washington.
This is such a NPR story.
Just the straight read. I love it.
I mean, it's just a fat, slow pitch down the middle for NPR.
And for us, here we are.
But he mentions like that the Secret Service was investigating him. So this is like a question of defacing money. Like, is this something that he could actually get in trouble for?
Okay, so he says he went to the Secret Service headquarters.
We tried to turn ourselves in and apparently the Secret Service doesn't listen to NPR or something. But they said, we don't have any record of you. Get out of our building.
I love it. He's like, arrest me.
I love that he's just trying to be, you know, he's just trying to provoke them to have something happen just so we can kick up enough dust to make this a thing.
Yeah, I think he's got a real sense of story and drama.
Oh, absolutely.
But ultimately, the type of defacing money that he was doing, it's not illegal. He's not trying to profit from it. So, you know, it's just legally not, not an issue.
And so did any of this, I mean, you showed me the final quarter. So I know Paul didn't get, you know, most of his original design back on the quarter. But did his protests ultimately have any influence on the design process?
Yeah, I mean, it was like this whole hubbub. And so the Mint did keep offering redesigns. But, you know, Paul just was never really happy with what they did. And the whole thing left a bit of a bitter taste in his mouth.
I divested of my coin collection during this entire process because I learned that basically I was the savings account for the US Mint. They anticipate that you will take sets of those state quarters out of circulation.
Plus, the $60,000 with the quarters that he bought to add his, his painting to the backup. So he created even more senior edge opportunities for the federal government through the quarter program without even probably intending.
Right, yeah, there's definitely a big irony here. And also, just throughout this whole saga, he made the Missouri State Quarter and those stickered quarters really hot commodities. Like, people definitely took them out of circulation. And that's a win for the Mint.
So if it's like, whether it's artist approved or not, the quarters did their job, at least in the eyes of the Mint.
Totally. Though Paul doesn't really think it's quite so black and white, because I asked him about that. I asked him, who won? Him or the Mint?
Oh, I totally won. Are you kidding? I had a blast and they created more opportunities for me than they cost me.
I really, I'm just part of the Paul fan club at this point. What a guy.
What a guy. Thank you, Paul. Thank you for your diligent effort fighting for your coin.
Well, Katie Thornton, thank you so much for this. I had a great time making this episode with you.
Thanks so much, Roman. Me too.
99% Invisible was reported this week by Katie Thornton and edited by Joe Rosenberg, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real, fact checking by Sona Avakian. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, LaShma Dawn, Kelly Prime, Jacob Adina Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradly, and me, Roman Mars. That 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to
that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.
This podcast is supported by Nurtac ODT. Remedy Pant. We know you didn't ask for an interruption, but migraine doesn't wait for the right moment to interrupt either. It just barges in, takes your time, and throws everything off. So when migraine takes your time, take Nurtac. It's for the acute treatment of migraine with or without aura in adults. Nurtac can provide pain relief in two hours, which can last up to two days. Ask your healthcare provider if Nurtac is right for you, because your time is for you, not migraine. Don't take if allergic to Nurtac ODT. Allergic reactions can occur even days after use. Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or throat. High blood pressure and Raynaud's syndrome can occur. Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, coolness.
Pain or color changes in fingers and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-NIRTECH or visit nirtac.com. All right, back to your podcast, playlist, or whatever's keeping you going today.
Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
