Mint Condition

 
 

The Royal Canadian Mint is two doors down from where I work. It makes some of the highest quality coinage found in the world. In fact, it's world famous and its products are highly prized possessions of numismatists the world over. It also makes coinage for foreign countries, like Barbados, whereas Canadian pocket change is made at the Winnipeg Mint.

Back in 1989-1991 we had a security consulting team from Atomic Energy of Canada (AECL) do a study on our facility, which I thought pretty strange until I realized they had done work for The Getty, for one, and knew what they were doing.

I was assigned to them as a liaison officer and one day after lunch they said they had to go to The Mint to commission a piece of equipment they had developed for them, and would I like to come along. I said I would and we went to The Mint where I witnessed the inauguration of a new security device.

Apparently, a long-time employee of The Mint had passed away and in his locker officials found over $100,000 worth of gold dust, shavings and scrap gold. Apparently, the employee had feared that the metal detection system would catch him carting off his hoard. He didn't know the The Mint never had such a system!

(Interesting how the Power of Rumour works. We have +300 cameras at The Gallery, many hidden in walls. I`ve been approached by paranoid staff on several occasions wondering if they were being video taped eating their lunch in the cafeteria or in their offices. So, not only are the Monets safe on the walls, but so it the cutlery in the kitchen!)

Mint management decided they needed a metal detector to foil others trying to secret gold from the premises. They commissioned AECL to build a metal detector - The Mother of all Metal Detectors.

It took almost a whole room. Staff would run a gauntlet, chuted through a narrow elevated walkway where footprints had been painted on a rubber track. You placed one hand on top of the other, placed them on your crotch and walked in stocking feet through the chute following the foot prints while security staff peered at monitors and CCTV cameras recorded you from all corners. You had to be enrolled or catalogued. It was very sensitive. Look out if you bought a new watch or had a couple of fillings changed. The Machine would know!

Sounded like a bit of a PITA to me at the time. Now, thinking back, I recall the cat-who-ate-the-canary looks of the Mint Managers who stood around, watching their Guinea pig volunteers walk though their device without their shoes. And it makes me wonder. How sensitive was it really? A hundredth of a gram of hidden gold is a small amount. And how does that compare to the studs in the new pair of jeans? Maybe the Mint Management was just building a bigger (rumour) mouse trap.

BTW, I hear you can get $50 a filling for a gold tooth. So if you have a jar with ol' Uncle Andy's gold teeth, now's the time to cash them in.

About ten years ago, someone realized that the ol' Mint in Ottawa had been minting gold coins for over 100 years and they'd been dependent on water from the Ottawa River. It flowed in and it flowed out of the facility. They thought,"Hey, maybe there's gold in them there river banks...". They applied for the mining rights, set up a dredge on a barge in the bay adjacent the Gallery, at the foot of The Mint, and began dredging the river's bottom. I guess they found another way to get the gold out of The Mint.