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Coins in concrete?

GregSY

Diamond
Joined
Jan 1, 2005
Location
Houston
My friend Dale has a shop that we think was built in 1928. He bought it from the original owners who told him they didn't have rebar back then so they used whatever metal they had lying around - axles, springs, etc. It must have worked OK - there are still no cracks.

Yesterday we noticed a 1919 penny embedded in the concrete slab by the door; we can't tell if it was put there accidentally or on purpose. Has anyone
heard of people putting coins in concrete slabs?
It seems like they would have used coin from the year of the building, but ???

Coin.JPG
 
whenever my cousin Bill Large built his shop he used the barrels that people had sent him to duplicate as the rebar. hundreds of origional 18th and 19th century barrels...jim
 
i did that once. took a quarter, ground the nickel off it to get to the copper, soldered an L piece of copper on the back and pushed it in the concrete. that was say, 14 years ago?

penny would work too, without the grinding of course.
 
lol

people still do it

as a kid we used to hang around the neighborhood lookin for em. some used a quarter! a quick smack with a hammer or rock and a friend and i could buy 25 pieces of penny candy!

-Jacob
 
So that's who took my quarter !!! ;)

Anyway I have to admit I have a philosophical opposition to rebar. The reason being that around the year 2000 my college announced it would spend X gajillion dollars to build a new stadium because the old stadium (built in the 1920s) had dilapidated and had to be torn down.

So all us alumni asked "How come our concrete stadium is done for after only 75 years when the Roman colliseum, also built of concrete, is still standing after 2000 years?" Pretty good question.

The answer is that the our stadium had rebar in it and the Roman colliseum does not have rebar in it. The rebar corrodes in a short time (75-100 years) and brings the whole building down. With no rebar concrete will last forever.
 
Horsepucky.

The Coliseum still stands because it was made with older stacked-stone techniques, and is ten or twenty times bulkier than it "could" be. They made it big because they had to.

The "modern" 1920s stadium was built with far stronger reinforced concrete, but also far, far less of it. A relatively small degradation in materials therefore has a greater effect on the "lighter" structure.

Also, and in this case probably much more likely, is the Coliseum is not "under code"- it doesn't need to conform to certain regulations and qualifications of use, occupancy, safety, and even toiletry.

The 1920s stadium was probably safer for a large crowd on its last day than the Coliseum is today.

In other words, just because it's "still standing" doesn't mean it's "safe for use" or "up to code" or has acceptable modern conveniences. Whether or not it has rebar is irrelevant.

Doc.
 
It is my understanding that this was the tradition. When I was a little kid I collected coins and heard this story - I looked around my dad's house (built in 1895) in hopes but nothing ever showed up. If your house was built in 1909, however, it might be worth a look - particularly if you live in San Francisco area. the 1909 S VDB coin is very rare and might pay for a hand tool or so.

Cheers,
Bob
 
OK, so here is a coin story from my youth. I collected coins and one summer in Chicago I bought an ice cream bar from the local ice-cream truck - operated by a collage kid. He breaks open a roll of quarters to give me my change (perhaps it was someone elses change) and the roll is full of uncirculated standing liberty quarters. This would have been around 1970 so these things would have been sitting in the bank for at least 40 years. The ice-cream guy had no idea what they were and I tried to buy some from him but he sensed, probably from my astonishment, that he had something. He then decided to look at the next roll and sure enough it was the same, and then the next ...

For a little kid this seemed particularly unfair - a guy without a clue hitting the jackpot while I had been "churning" rolls of pennies at the bank looking for something old and having very little success.

Cheers,
Bob Welland
 
Something else occurred to me...

So all us alumni asked "How come our concrete stadium is done for after only 75 years when the Roman colliseum, also built of concrete, is still standing after 2000 years?" Pretty good question.
-Did you mean the partially collapsed and partially reconstructed several times Coliseum? Is that the apple you're comparing to your orange? :D

Doc.
 
when I worked at the supermarket a kid superglued a quarter to the floor in front of his register. He wanted to add a bit of enjoyment to his usually long and boring shift. He said it was hilarious to watch as everyone tried to pick it up not realizing it was glued to the floor :D
. Maybe in 1919 some one in your friend's shop had a sense of humor.

Adam
 
Current-year pennies would be a disappointment in this outdoor application. Pennies are now ZINC inside. Have been for many years now. (They are also made in roll dies. Examine a new one, and you will find that one side is considerably thicker than the other.) They have to be Zinc because otherwise the bronze would start to look good as scrap metal whenever copper is above $1.18/lb. (IIRC)

Sidewalks in older cities often have bronze signs inset into them. Sometimes it is the name of the concrete contractor. Sometimes it is an advertisement for the adjacent store, like it might say "Woolworth" or "Drugs". (That last one became a kind of bitter joke.....)

Most interesting sidewalks I've ever seen were in downtown Jersey City. Huge slabs of stone, not concrete, more than ten feet across, building-to-curb. Seemed to be some kind of pink granite.

Once saw a bar that was covered in bright pennies and then poured with some kind of clear plastic resin.

John Ruth
 
There is the:
_Million Dollar Cowboy Bar_
in Jackson WY. The whole bar is covered with Silver Dollars, and encased in (maybe?) polyeurethane. And it is a very long bar. Obviously not done recently.
Pete
 
I worked for a TV station in Miami and we did a reconstruction of the technical area. Complete rebuild, wall to wall. There was a "good luck" penny that was glued to the glass in the door from the original construction. Since the door was removed and replaced, we removed the penny and glued (super glue this time) to the new glass wall.

Was it lucky? I guess so as they are still in business.

Paul A.
 
Once I was in a city (might have been San Francisco) where in several places, upside-down wine bottles were embedded in the sidewalks and, somehow, were at night were illuminated from underneath. Sort of a neat effect.
 
I put a coin of the current year in many of the masonry projects I do. I also find coins in old buildings when I do repair work. It helps to know the age of a chimney or stair when determining the repair required.
 








 
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