Page 49 - merged.pdf

•Four Greatest Licences to Print Money 29

ment of the twentieth century. This was against other famous constructions such as
the Golden Gate Bridge and the Panama Canal.

The original licence was due to expire in 2042, but extra years were granted
and the company has sole rights to charging for use of the tunnel until 2086. Even-
tually this will be another licence to print money – the opposite of Camelot, which is
relatively fast in fast out. The shareholders should have plenty to look forward to, or
at least their descendants should. Now that is planning in the long term.

Idea 23 – Making a Mint

There is now only one holder of the licence to print UK coinage, and that is the
Royal Mint. This was not always the case. For more than 1500 years from the Iron
Age to the Restoration of Charles II, coins were struck by hand. To begin with there
were many English ‘moneyers’ operating in towns and villages across the Kingdom.
People laboured in what were little more than blacksmith shops hammering blanks
between a pair of dies.

A single mint was set up in 1279 within the Tower of London and operated
there until it then moved into purpose-built premises on Tower Hill. The present
modern coinage plant was built to start the process of minting coins for decimalisa-
tion in the UK in 1971. These premises are in Llantrisant in South Wales.

The Royal Mint now boasts some of the most advanced coining machinery in
the world. It works like this:

In the foundry, strips of metal are drawn from large electric furnaces, reduced
to the required thickness in a tandem rolling mill and transferred to large blank
presses where coin blanks can be punched out at the rate of 10,000 per minute.

The blanks are softened and cleaned in the Annealing and Pickling Plant before
the final process in the Coining Press Room. Here the blanks are fed into coining
presses where the obverse and reverse designs, as well as the milling edge, are stamped
onto the blank simultaneously.