Auction Prices Provide Historical Perspective(Con't)

The next sale that is on my radar screen is the Earle collection, sold by Henry Chapman in June 1912, where a $630 price was realized by a 1794 dollar in uncirculated. To put it in perspective, gold was $35 an ounce, the Consumer Price Index (1982=100) was 9.4 1 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (just 21 stocks) was 87.
Flash forward a few years to 1946 and the sale of the William Cutter Atwater collection by B. Max Mehl. Lot 185 was the 1794 dollar in uncirculated, and the price realized was $1,575. The next year, Mehl sold the Will W. Neil collection with another 1794 dollar, also uncirculated, at $1,250. (By then the CPI had increased to 22.34 on the same scale; the Dow Jones average was a whopping 179).
In 1950, Stack's fixed-price list #48 showed an uncirculated example selling at $1,595. That becomes important because it goes to B.M. Embanks. (The coin came out of the F.C.C. Boyd collection in the mid-1940s, when A. Kosoff sold it for $2,000).
There aren't that many uncirculated 1794 silver dollars around. In fact, of the 1,758 that were struck, all evidently, on the same day in October 1794, only 125 to 150 coins survive today in any condition. There were evident difficulties in striking because of press size and, after this small mintage, no more dollars were struck until May 1795 when new equipment had been secured at the Philadelphia Mint.
Rare coins selling at rarified prices are a relatively new phenomenon in the numismatic marketplace. We speak today of million-dollar coins in an almost commonplace manner, but it was just 33 years ago that Larry Goldberg made his call to me in the newsroom of Numismatic News to say that an uncirculated 1794 dollar (they weren't graded numerically for the most part back then) actually brought $110,000.
Just a month earlier, in September 1973, Abner Kreisberg and Jerry Cohen (Quality Coins) had sold a nice uncirculated specimen for $51,000 - itself a record price - but that was no match for the pedigree of this coin: Lord St. Oswald acquired it at the Philadelphia Mint on a visit shortly after striking, on Oct. 15, 1794.
Its early history did not portend its historic status; at a Christie's sale of Oct. 13, 1967, Lot 138 was simply catalogued as "USA, dollar, 1794, a similar coin in mint state" to the preceding lot - yes, two uncirculated 1794 dollars were offered, back to back, one a better class of uncirculated than the other. " Light scratches on obverse" (planchet adjustment marks) and "some rim damage on the reverse" were noted, together with the opinion that it was "very well struck " It realized 11,500 at that sale. (The price was actually £4,000 pounds for each of the two coins in consecutive lots.)
At the time of the 1967 sale, it commanded interest on both sides of the Atlantic. Dealer Norman Stack of the New York City firm of Stack's flew to London to bid on the coin. (This was before long-distance travel was commonplace, and when a business trip abroad was more likely to be an event of several weeks' duration rather than mere hours.)

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