Mercury Dime

History

The Mint Act of 1890 permitted a coin design to be replaced after 25 years, and Charles E. Barber's dime, quarter and half dollar had been in circulation since 1892. That clock ran out in 1916, and all three silver denominations were remade at once, the first time in American history that the dime, quarter and half dollar carried different designs. Adolph A. Weinman, a former student of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, was selected through an invitation extended to sculptors outside the Mint and ended up executing two of the three, the dime and the half dollar. Coinage began in the fall of 1916 at Philadelphia, Denver and San Francisco, and the new dime reached circulation at the end of October. No dimes were struck in 1932 or 1933, leaving a gap that splits the series into early and later dates, and production ended in 1945 with the arrival of the Roosevelt dime the following year. The popular name came from the press, which took the winged cap on Weinman's young Liberty for the headgear of the Roman god Mercury.

Details

Weinman designed both faces. The alloy was 0.900 silver and 0.100 copper throughout, with no wartime substitution of the kind applied to the five cent piece, making this the last dime the Mint struck entirely in .900 fine silver. Each coin weighs 2.500 grams, measures 17.91 mm across and carries a reeded edge of 118 reeds. Philadelphia struck without a mint mark, while Denver used D and San Francisco used S. The 1916-D mintage of 264,000 is by far the lowest of the series, against 22,180,080 from Philadelphia and 10,450,000 from San Francisco in the same first year.

Features

The obverse shows a young Liberty in a winged Phrygian cap facing left, with LIBERTY and the date, and Weinman's AW monogram to the right of the neck. Weinman explained that the wings stood for liberty of thought rather than fleetness of foot. The reverse pairs a fasces with an olive branch, which he described as unity, the battle ax as readiness to defend the Union, and the branch as the country's love of peace. ONE DIME appears on the reverse, and the mint mark sits in the lower left field, between the E of ONE and the base of the olive branch. The 1916-D has long attracted added mint mark fakes built on genuine 1916 Philadelphia hosts; on authentic examples the D slants with its top to the right and appears nearly square.

Notable facts

• Each Mercury dime contains 0.07234 troy ounce of silver.
• Several 1916 patterns are known, differing in small details, and some lack the AW monogram entirely.
• Weinman is believed to have modeled Liberty on Elsie Stevens, wife of the lawyer and poet Wallace Stevens.
• Walter Breen attributed the tiny 1916 Denver dime output to that mint suspending dime work so its staff could concentrate on quarters, an explanation PCGS presents as attribution rather than settled fact.
• A 1916-D graded MS-67 FB by PCGS with CAC approval brought $204,000 in a March 2020 sale of the D. Brent Pogue Collection.
• CAC, NGC and PCGS have together certified nearly 400,000 business strikes of the type, with the most frequently graded dates falling from the middle of the series onward.
• NGC's grading guide warns that circulated examples wear in a pattern that does not match the illustrations in popular grading guides, including ANA standards, which makes lower grades difficult to assign.