The September 2008 meeting of the Atlantic County Numismatic Society (ACNS) was held on September 3, 2008 at the Linwood library at 7pm and the theme was “Medals of the Olympics.”
Club president Jason O’Grady gave a presentation on how medals are part of the field of Numismatics and when better to discuss them than around the time of the Olympics? Medals were a timely topic for the meeting which took place just after the closing ceremonies of an amazing Summer 2008 Olympics in Being.
Some of the things that we learned included:
- Each Olympic medal must be at least 70mm across and 6mm thick.
- Gold medals contains 6 grams of gold and the remaining 92% is silver. The gold is gilted on to the silver.
- Silver medals contain 99% pure silver and the remaining 1% is raw unprocessed silver.
- Bronze medals contain 1% silver and the remaining 99% is what is called coinage bronze, which is made up of 97% copper (Cu), 2.5% zinc (Zn) and 0.5% tin (Sn).
- 10.5 Kg Of Gold, 1050 Kg of Silver, 1054 Kg of Copper was used for medals at the Beijing Olympics.
You can download the presentation here (1.5MB PDF). Requires Adobe Acrobat reader.