Our modern day, working coins come in only four sizes and denominations really. We have a copper-plated zinc one-cent piece, often called a penny by the public. Moving up, we use a copper-nickel alloy 5 cent that we routinely call a nickel. At the top, we have copper-nickel sandwich alloys for both our dime and quarter. Yes, we do have half dollars and dollar coins – which rarely get seen in everyday commerce. We even have a wide series of bullion coins, each with some nominal value on them far below the value of the precious metal in them. But the cent, nickel, dime, and quarter do most of the work of daily transactions when any type of coin is needed. Yet it wasn’t always so. Let’s take a moment and examine some of the other, perhaps stranger, coins we have used, and perhaps one or two that other nations have used which we never seem to have thought of.
