2010 Franklin Pierce MS68

History

The Presidential $1 Coin Act of 2005, Public Law 109-145, was signed on December 22, 2005 and required circulating dollars honoring each president at four designs per year beginning January 1, 2007. To open up the faces of the coin, Congress moved the year of issue, the mint mark and the mottos to the edge, an incused-edge treatment that had not previously been used on a large scale in United States coinage. Because the edge inscriptions are applied in a separate operation after striking, coins travel from the presses in tote bins and are fed into edge-lettering machines, and any that bypass that step leave the mint with a plain edge. Franklin Pierce, the fourteenth president, was the second of the four 2010 releases, in the program's fourth year.

Details

On a normal Presidential dollar the date and mint mark appear only on the edge, so an example that missed the lettering operation carries neither, and the coin cannot be assigned to Philadelphia or Denver. It is attributed to 2010 solely because the Pierce portrait was used that year. The host issue was produced in quantity, with the Denver Mint reporting 38,360,000 business strikes of the 2010 Pierce dollar. Size, weight and metallic composition match the Sacagawea dollar, and the number of blank-edge coins that escaped is not tracked by the Mint, so population is known only through grading-service censuses.

Features

The diagnostic is simple and absolute: the edge is smooth and free of any incused characters, leaving the coin without a date or mint mark anywhere on it. The obverse carries the portrait of Franklin Pierce with inscriptions naming him, and the reverse is the single standardized design shared by every issue in the program. Doubled edge lettering, partial edge lettering and improperly spaced edge lettering are separate recognized errors within the series and should not be conflated with a fully blank edge. Since the error is defined by the absence of a feature rather than the presence of one, certified examples are the safer purchase.

Notable facts

• NGC has certified Missing Edge Lettering examples for each of the first 15 issues in the series, running from Washington through Buchanan.
• The 2007 Washington dollar is by far the most frequently encountered of the blank-edge coins, followed by John Adams, William Henry Harrison, Taylor, Fillmore and Van Buren, a group that does not include Pierce.
• NGC received a submission of 16 James Madison dollars missing edge lettering that had come from Mint Sets, and certified them with the SMS designation because they carried the satin finish unique to those sets.
• Because coins enter the edge-lettering machines in random orientation, the position of the edge inscriptions relative to the obverse and reverse varies on normal coins and carries no premium.
• Blank-edge coins stop appearing after the Buchanan issue of 2010, consistent with tightened controls over the post-strike edge-lettering operation.