What is the history of the buffalo nickel?

Answer 1

President Theodore Roosevelt was a strong proponent of improving the artwork on American coins. As a result of his and others' efforts, during the first decade of the 20th century five coins had already been redesigned. The successor Taft Administration felt that the nickel also deserved a makeover and began planning in 1911 and selected the artist James Earle Fraser to create the new coin.

Fraser's designs were ready in 1912 but production was held up by objections from Hobbs Manufacturing, a producer of coin-acceptors for vending machines, that the new design wouldn't work in their equipment. Those objections were in fact unfounded because the new coins had exactly the same size, weight, and electronic characteristics of their predecessors but the company persisted into early 1913. (Parenthetically, that delay led the Mint to prepare new Liberty Head dies dated 1913 in case the design had to be re-issued; that enabled some Mint employees to surreptitiously strike 5 such nickels which are now among the rarest US Coins.)

In February 1913 the Secretary of the Treasury declared that the new nickels would be produced in spite of the Hobbs Co.'s objections. The coins were shown to the public on February 22, 1913 and released to full circulation on March 4.

Even though the new design was very popular and didn't cause problems for vending machines, once full-scale production was underway two problems surfaced. First, the design caused coinage dies (the anvil-like metal parts that create the image) to break about three times as fast as they had with the old Liberty Head design. Second, both the date and denomination were raised relative to the coin's rim and would wear off very quickly.

Fraser worked with the Mint's engravers and technicians to fix the problem. The grassy mound on which the buffalo had been standing was reduced to a stretch of flat plane, and the denomination was made larger and recessed more deeply. This resulted in two different designs during 1913; today collectors simply refer to them as Type I and Type II nickels. For unknown reasons, though, the date wasn't modified.

Fraser's tweaks reduced die breakage somewhat but the Mint was never able to find a complete fix. In addition their failure to address wear in the date area meant that many of the coins eventually became "dateless" and so were lost to the numismatic community.

In spite of the buffalo nickel's great popularity the Mint decided to replace the design as soon as it reached the statutory 25-year minimum between changes. It was followed by the familiar Jefferson design that, with modifications, is still in use today.