The Most Exciting Change America Has Ever Seen

Summary

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99% Invisible

Episode: The Most Exciting Change America Has Ever Seen

Host: Roman Mars
Date: June 23, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of 99% Invisible takes a deep dive into the design, purpose, and cultural phenomenon of the U.S. State Quarters program. Host Roman Mars and reporter Katie Thornton explore the little-noticed but high-impact ways coin design intersects with American identity, economics, and even protest. Anchored by a visit to a numismatics convention in Savannah, Georgia, the story unpacks how a government scheme to increase profits using simple metal discs became a defining act of civic engagement and pop culture through “the most exciting change America has ever seen.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Numismatics and the Culture of Collecting

• Numismatics is the study and collection of coins.
• The American Numismatic Association convention is described as a haven for passionate collectors, with booths for everything from rare “gold rush” pieces to specialized oddities like “elongated” (pressed) pennies. (01:21–02:31)

2. History of American Coins

• Early America lacked a standard currency; settlers used a jumble of foreign coins and even grains as money. (04:44–07:06)
  • Jesse Kraft: “The first pieces of money that were legislated as legal tender was actually corn.” (06:40)
• Standardization began post-independence, inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s push for easy-to-understand denominations based on Spanish currency (halves, quarters, dollars). (07:23–07:52)
• Coin values were historically anchored in precious metal content, making exchange cumbersome and dependent on weighing and condition. (05:43–06:17)

3. Coin Design and Technology

• Early U.S. coins featured simple, consistent designs to deter counterfeiting.
• George Washington refused to have his face on coins, associating portraits with monarchy:
  • Caroline Turco: “[He] said, absolutely not, because that is for a monarchy. …Over my dead body.” (09:58–10:25)
• The advent of the Janvier reduction machine in the early 20th century enabled more detailed, artistic coin designs, ushering in the “American Renaissance of coins.” (11:47–12:59)

4. The Shift to Clad Coinage and Seigniorage

• 1960s: Metal content of coins switched from silver to “clad” metal (copper/nickel) to save money (aka the “Johnson Sandwich”).
• Seigniorage: the practice of minting coins for less than their face value and profiting from the difference.
  • Philip Diehl: “Like any product in business, you hope to produce it at a cost that is less than what you sell it for.” (15:52)
• By the 1970s–’90s, rising copper costs threatened these profits, motivating further innovations. (18:05–19:12)

5. The Birth and Economics of State Quarters

• The U.S. Mint (under Philip Diehl) needed a way to boost profit (seigniorage) as production got pricier.
• Key Insight: The State Quarters program was deliberately engineered to encourage ordinary citizens—not just collectors—to hoard quarters, permanently taking them out of circulation and thus forcing banks to buy more from the Mint. (20:24–21:09)
  • Philip Diehl: “And so I’m sort of famous there for having created the 50 state quarters program." (20:55)
• The design rollout: five new quarters each year, in the order states ratified the Constitution—making Delaware first, much to the sponsoring congressman’s delight. (22:06–22:17)
• The Mint predicted the initiative would yield at least $2.6 billion in profits due to increased hoarding and was proven correct. (23:09–27:40)
  • Philip Diehl: “Those circulating quarters were in huge demand and were taken out of circulation, and that’s where that $2.6 billion come from.” (27:44–27:56)
• Kermit the Frog became an official spokes-frog for the program, emphasizing its mass appeal. (23:59–24:15)

6. Cultural Mania and Personal Stories

• The nation collectively participated—children, parents, even teenagers became “accidental numismatists.” (25:40–26:18)
• Private companies profited by selling coin display albums and accessories. (26:23–26:56)
• The “treasure hunt” of locating all 50 quarters was the central allure. (24:45–25:03)
• Katie Thornton humorously confirms: “To this day, I am loathe to part with a Connecticut quarter. I mean, have you seen this thing? It is gorgeous.” (26:06–26:18)
• The program’s popularity doubled the demand for quarters during its run. (27:20)

7. The Protest of Paul Jackson: Design Disputes & Sticker Quarters

• Design Process: States held competitions for quarter designs, but the Mint retained final approval, occasionally frustrating artists.
• Paul Jackson (Missouri-based artist) had his design for the Missouri quarter altered substantially by the Mint, leading to public outcry.
  • Paul Jackson: “Instead of two guys in a canoe, it had three. Larry, Moe and Curly. …The trees are made of broccoli.” (38:32)
• Jackson initiated a protest, printing 250,000 stickers of his original design and affixing them to quarters in lieu of official approval—then spent them everywhere, even on a cross-country trip, and provoked (ultimately harmless) Secret Service scrutiny.
  • “The first word out of my mouth was awesome.” (41:19)
• Ultimately, Jackson declared victory despite not seeing his design minted:
  • “Oh, I totally won. …They created more opportunities for me than they cost me.” (46:17–46:26)

8. The Greater Legacy

• The State Quarters program mainstreamed numismatics, created communal rituals, and netted billions for the government.
• It also sparked debates over design, state identity, and civic participation—an enduring example of how a small, everyday object can have profound impact.
• The practice of putting rare or special coins back into circulation by collectors was highlighted as a way to spark curiosity in new generations. (29:01–29:27)
• Roman Mars ends with a personal anecdote about purchasing a 1951 San Francisco mint quarter and “freeing” it to circulation, underscoring the episode’s theme of coins as living history. (30:54–31:26)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On George Washington and Coinage:
  • “Over my dead body.” – Caroline Turco, on Washington’s refusal to appear on coins (10:25)
• On seniorage and profit:
  • “The goal for the Mint is to make coins as cheaply as possible, but to still sell them at their face value so that they can turn a profit just like any other product.” – Philip Diehl (16:10)
• On the universal impact:
  • “State quarters turned us all into numismatists. …It put the collecting bug in all of us, at least a little bit.” – Roman Mars (29:27)
• On design disappointment:
  • “The arch crosses the river from Illinois to Missouri. Plus the trees are made of broccoli.” – Paul Jackson (38:32)
• On protest and coin culture:
  • “How does it feel to be under Secret Service investigation for defacing money? …Awesome.” – Paul Jackson (41:19)
• On the communal feel:
  • “I remember standing in lines at music concerts or restaurants and being around teenagers…talking about the quarters.” – Philip Diehl (25:40)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Numismatic Convention & Culture: 01:21–02:41
• Foundations of U.S. Currency: 04:44–08:49
• Design Decisions & Technological Advances: 08:58–12:59
• Clad Coinage, Seigniorage & Mint Economics: 13:38–18:57
• Origin and Launch of State Quarters: 19:12–24:36
• National Quarters Craze ('Treasure Hunt') and Mass Collecting: 24:45–27:20
• Final Accounting – Program Success: 27:20–28:11
• Collectors Putting Coins Back into Circulation: 29:01–29:27
• Paul Jackson & Missouri Quarter Protest: 36:39–46:30
• Reflections & Closing Thoughts: 46:30–46:44

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Tone & Style

The episode blends Roman Mars’s signature curiosity, dry humor, and reverence for design’s hidden influence with the enthusiasm of guests and coin collectors. Katie Thornton brings a reporter’s eye for detail and an accessibility that makes complex economic concepts engaging. Interviewees like Jesse Kraft and Philip Diehl provide historical and insider context, while Paul Jackson injects the narrative with a blend of earnestness, mischief, and artistic pride.

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Summary Takeaways

• The State Quarters program wasn’t just an exercise in design—it was a clever financial maneuver, a mass cultural project, and a source of ongoing debate over the intersection of art, government, and collective memory.
• Ordinary Americans—by the millions—became part of a grand design project, transforming the humble quarter from a mere medium of exchange into a piece of living history and, sometimes, a symbol of protest.

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For more stories on the hidden design of everyday things, subscribe to 99% Invisible and visit 99pi.org.

Transcript

[Roman Mars]

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[Roman Mars]

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[Katie Thornton]

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[Philip Diehl]

Six o' clock today.

[Katie Thornton]

For the uninitiated, numismatics is the fancy word for coins and the study of coins.

[Roman Mars]

Okay, massive room. There are dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of vendors and that's reporter

[Katie Thornton]

and novice numismatist Katie Thornton.

[Roman Mars]

This was my first time at a coin show, but right away I could tell that this convention was not necessarily catering to the merely coin curious. More than anything, this show was for collectors, mostly of US Coins, with each booth featuring something for which there was some kind of small but extremely avid fandom.

[Philip Diehl]

These gold pieces were made with gold from the California Gold Rush.

[Katie Thornton]

We're a specialist in what's called three cent silvers or trimes.

[Roman Mars]

These are half dimes.

[Paul Jackson]

Have you ever heard of half dime?

[Roman Mars]

I have now. There was also a society dedicated to crushed pennies, like when the machines smushed the pennies, or as they call them, elongateds.

[Caroline Turco]

Why do we stop on pennies?

[Roman Mars]

You give me a foreign currency and we'll smash it and see how lovely the design comes out.

[Katie Thornton]

But Katie wasn't on the hunt for anything quite so niche. Instead, she was in Savannah to learn about what has to be the most widely collected coin in American history.

[Roman Mars]

So I'm of the age where my sort of introduction to coin collecting was the state quarters. Do you have any you could show me? Oh yeah, of course. Everyone in America knows about state quarters. Chances are you have one hiding in your couch cushion right now.

[Katie Thornton]

From 1999 until 2009, the US Mint issued 56 special quarter designs, one for each state and territory. And Washington, D.C. they put billions of

[Roman Mars]

these special quarters into circulation. On the front, you'll see the classic profile of George Washington. But turn any of them over and you'll see an engraving of something that some state or territory likes about itself. The quarter from my home state of Minnesota features a loon. Kansas has a bison, and Illinois, well, it couldn't decide. So it has Lincoln kind of framed by the outline of the state with the Sears Tower in the background.

[Katie Thornton]

Somewhat awkwardly, two different state quarters featured the Wright Brothers Flyer, because the first modern airplane was built in Ohio, but it was flown in North Carolina.

[Roman Mars]

But the state quarters series is more than just a bunch of cool designs on the back of some coins. Yeah, when they first came out, if you were like me, you probably thought, hey, cute. A fun little thing the government did just for the hell of it. But that's just not true in reality. Just beneath its shiny metal surface, the Stake Quarters initiative was a high stakes government program, one in which coin collecting played a critical role.

[Katie Thornton]

Because it turns out, the mint didn't spend all those years creating billions of new coins just for the sake of civic pride. Instead, the state quarters were developed for the express purpose of getting us to collect them and to turn a healthy profit for the US Government.

[Roman Mars]

Today, the story of how the US makes money off of making money, and how it makes even more if you collect.

[Katie Thornton]

In many ways, the mint State quarters program is the product of a series of innovations in American currency, starting with the invention of the quarter itself. Because for the first 200 years of colonial history, America didn't even have a standard system of denomination.

[Jesse Kraft]

So the earliest coins that were used in the earliest settlements of what became the United States were literally the coins that settlers brought in their pockets.

[Roman Mars]

Jesse Craft is an assistant curator at the American Numismatic Society, not the American Numismatic association, which put on the coin show a different numismatic group. And he focuses on American coins.

[Jesse Kraft]

The first boats that came over actually had a lot of German settlers as well. So there's a good mix of German coins, English coins, of course, Spanish American coins.

[Roman Mars]

Soon, coins from all over the world made their way into the colonies. English shillings, Portuguese Joes, German thalers. It was chaotic. It's not like the exchange rate for these things was one to one.

[Katie Thornton]

But Kraft says there's one thing making it easier. In those days, coins were made almost entirely of rare precious metals like gold or more often, silver. That meant that no matter what country the coin was from, its Value was determined by its metal content, how much gold or silver was in there.

[Jesse Kraft]

So each piece was weighed to check its gold weight. And because the different coins had different weights and wore down, even just like a little bit of friction on a gold coin would actually affect its value.

[Roman Mars]

And if that sounds impractical, well, it often was. Imagine trying to buy a herd of sheep only to find that the precious silver coin you'd had in your satchel this whole time was too worn down to pay for it all. Complicating things further, there were never enough of these random worn down coins making their way into the colonies for everyone to use in the first place. So the colonists also had to use something else as money.

[Jesse Kraft]

One of the first pieces of money that was, like, legislated as legal tender was actually corn.

[Katie Thornton]

Corn, wheat and barley were all literally used as money with an exchange rate just like any other currency. In 1631, for example, one bushel of corn had the same spending power as six English shillings.

[Jesse Kraft]

They even accepted corn for payment in taxes. That's how legal it was. Like, this is money.

[Roman Mars]

Eventually, though, people got tired of buying their cows with a combination of random European denominations plus a bunch of bulky, loose grain. So after the United States won its independence, its leaders finally decided that we might want to make our own standardized monetary system.

[Jesse Kraft]

You know, it was at that point Jefferson wrote his now famous Notes on Coinage. Oh, yeah, so famous, you know, very simple name, but it kind of redefined everything.

[Roman Mars]

Jefferson basically says, hey, British money is confusing. A pence is 1,240th of a pound. A farthing is 1,960th. Spanish money, though, it uses easy common sense fractions, halves, quarters. That's what we should do.

[Katie Thornton]

So in 1792, the US Mint began making dollar coins, named for the Spanish dollar, as the United States base unit.

[Roman Mars]

Just like their Spanish predecessors, dollar coins were made of silver. And early on, the mint made gold coins too. They were called eagles. That's literally the name of the coin. Silver dollars and gold eagles. An eagle was worth ten dollars.

[Caroline Turco]

So these are half eagles, these five dollar pieces.

[Roman Mars]

This is Caroline Turco. She is a curator at the American Numismatic Association. I ran into her at the coin show and Savannah where she showed me these old gold coins.

[Caroline Turco]

So it's based on weight. So the $5 half Eagles here are $5 worth of gold, give or take a few cents at that time to consider the amount of work and money it took to make it. And then the smaller ones, they're a quarter eagle, and they are worth two and a half dollars worth of gold

[Katie Thornton]

and silver coins worked pretty much the same way, which is to say, the way they do today. Dollars, half dollars, and, of course, quarters.

[Roman Mars]

But beyond just standardizing the denominations, the early US Mint faced another equally important numismatic task. It had to decide what our coins would look like.

[Katie Thornton]

Only these first designs were nothing like our modern state quarters. Instead of dozens of elaborate variations, early US Coins only featured a small number of very simple, some would say boring, motifs and. And deliberately so. That's because the mint used design, in part to guard against counterfeiting. By making engravings clean, simple, and consistent, you could easily spot any deviation.

[Jesse Kraft]

One of the reasons why they wanted to keep the design so similar was if they all had minor, minor differences, then a counterfeiter could create another coin with a minor difference that would just kind of be accepted.

[Roman Mars]

All these counterfeiting countermeasures required that the first US Coins all looked pretty much the same. And thanks to our first president, they didn't even have any real faces on them.

[Caroline Turco]

The first U.S. mint, they go to George Washington and they say, sir, we're going to need your bust to be made so that we can have your face on coins. But he says, absolutely not, because that is for a monarchy. And George is like, we literally just fought a war to get rid of our monarch. How dare you try to make me into that same state. And he said, over my dead body. Which, by the way, if you've seen a quarter recently, awkward.

[Katie Thornton]

But even more than the concern over counterfeiting or Washington's living body, it was the technology of the time that limited the design of these early coins.

[Roman Mars]

Engravers in the 19th century had to carve designs by hand into a tiny steel stamp called a die, using even tinier little chisel tools. They didn't have electric lights, so they were doing this outside or in a window or straining their eyes in candlelight. Then they'd have to either put some metal under the die and hammer the image onto the coin to be, or stamp the design onto the coin with a press powered by human muscle or horses or eventually, steam. Not easy.

[Katie Thornton]

The first human figure allowed on a US Coin was Lady Liberty. But given the technological constraints, the Mintz engravers quickly discovered there wasn't much you could do with her.

[Roman Mars]

Initially, it was mostly her head. Her head in profile with flowing hair. Later, her hair was tied up with a ribbon. Eventually, they figured out how to get her whole body on there. But even so, the coin designs from year to year were pretty bland, until finally in 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt said,

[Caroline Turco]

hey, our coinage is ugly.

[Katie Thornton]

He actually described the design of American coins as atrocious hideousness.

[Caroline Turco]

He was not playing around. And Theodore Roosevelt was like, I want good stuff again.

[Roman Mars]

Luckily, at some point during Teddy's tantrum, he made a specific demand. The US Mint, he urged, should import a near miraculous new device that had recently been invented in France. It was called the Genevieve reduction machine.

[Jesse Kraft]

Essentially, you could sculpt a large sized coin, you know, sometimes two and three feet in diameter, you know, quote unquote coin, and then you could put this design onto the John Vieille reduction machine, and it would have this little stylus and just slowly, slowly go over the design and at the same exact time engrave that design onto a die the actual size of the coin.

[Katie Thornton]

Oh, so cool.

[Roman Mars]

The Janvier machine allowed the mint to mass produce coins with a level of detail that would have been impossible before suddenly Lady Liberty could do more things.

[Katie Thornton]

Starting in the early 1900s, you got liberty walking towards a rising sun, Liberty ascending a mountain with a capital dome in the background, Liberty with a winged phryngian cap with a beautiful column wrapped in a vining olive plant on the other side. This aesthetic revolution in US Currency has been termed the American Renaissance of coins.

[Roman Mars]

It even led to an explosion in special commemorative coin designs in the 1930s for things like the Texas Centennial and the opening of the Bay Bridge, to the point that the whole thing actually got kind of out of hand.

[Caroline Turco]

There is one commemorative coin that was made to have a living person on it. It was an Alabama senator.

[Roman Mars]

Alabama? Why?

[Caroline Turco]

Because he wanted his face on a coin.

[Katie Thornton]

But the ability to put almost anything you wanted on a coin was not enough on its own to pave the way for the state quarters program. For that to happen, US Coins would need to undergo one more critical transformation, this time to their metal content.

[Roman Mars]

Remember, up until this point, silver coins were still made of silver. They had that inherent metal value. But in the 1960s, that ended. President Lyndon Johnson got rid of all of our pretty, shiny silver coins and replaced them with something called clad coins.

[Katie Thornton]

In clad coinage, a piece of low cost kind of ugly metal is clad in a thin layer of something a little bit prettier. It's a much cheaper way to make a coin. So in 1965, looking for ways to save money, Johnson convinced Congress to stop putting silver in coins. Instead, he had them minted from copper and then covered in nickel. They were nicknamed Johnson Sandwiches.

[Roman Mars]

Jesse Kraft says that prior to this, if a national government ever debased its Currency, they would only dare to do it very gradually, changing the coin's metal content a little at a time over the course of decades.

[Katie Thornton]

Lbj, God bless him, just went ahead and did it all at once.

[Jesse Kraft]

1964, literally all the coins are silver. 1965, none of them are silver. So it kind of like created valueless coins. So it's actually one of the most significant things that's ever happened since perhaps the beginning of coins themselves. And no one seemed to care.

[Roman Mars]

And it's true, no one really cared. Everyone just carried on as if we were all still lugging these little pieces of silver around and continued spending and accepting US Coins like nothing had changed.

[Katie Thornton]

But for the Mint, everything had changed, because this strange metallurgical bait and switch meant that suddenly a coin like a quarter costs way less than a quarter to make. And that discrepancy between the production cost of the coin and its face value allowed the Mint to engage in a money making scheme beloved by governments the world over. It's called seigniorage.

[Philip Diehl]

Okay, Seigniorage. It's really a simple concept.

[Roman Mars]

This is Philip Deal. These days, he's the president of US Money Reserve, a coin seller. A few decades ago, though, he was director of the U.S. mint. And he says, to understand seigniorage, you have to think of the Mint as a business, a business whose product is coins.

[Philip Diehl]

And that is, like any product in business, you hope to produce it at a cost that is less than what you sell it for.

[Katie Thornton]

So the goal for the Mint is to make coins as cheaply as possible, but to still sell them at their face value so that they can turn a profit just like any other product.

[Philip Diehl]

And when you do that with coins, that's called seigniorage.

[Roman Mars]

So seigniorage is the profit the Mint makes from selling a coin for more than it costs to produce it. Like Philip said, simple.

[Katie Thornton]

Now, if you're wondering who would be stupid enough to pay 25 cents for a coin that only costs a few cents to make, well, you are. And me, too.

[Roman Mars]

And me. We all end up paying full face value for these coins, thanks to a chain of sale that starts with the Mint's largest customer, the independent Federal Reserve

[Katie Thornton]

bank, which, just for clarity, operates independently of the federal government.

[Philip Diehl]

The Federal Reserve, they pay us the face value of the coin, and then those coins are distributed to the regional Federal Reserve banks. And the regional Federal Reserve banks then take orders from the banking system in the United States, and the coins are delivered to the banks.

[Roman Mars]

Let me translate. At the risk of Making this part a little too simple, the Mint makes coins, again, let's say quarters, as cheaply as it can. The banks then buy those quarters at face value from the Mint. Businesses buy quarters at face value from banks. And when we get change from the cash registers at those businesses and we get those quarters, so everyone in that sequence, banks, businesses, people pay 25 cents for something that the Mint originally made for much, much less.

[Katie Thornton]

Once a quarter gets old and worn out, the US government can end up buying it back and recycling the metal. But that can take a long time

[Philip Diehl]

and that coin might have circulated for 30 years. And so for us, the mint, that coin is basically like a 30 year long term loan, interest free.

[Roman Mars]

So in the end, the only one turning a profit is the US government. But the truth is, this approach only worked well for a little while.

[Katie Thornton]

When the US first started making significant seigniorage off of coins in the 1960s, it was a good bet. The difference between the production cost and the sales price ensured that the mint made about four and a half cents off of every nickel, 9.5 cents off of every dime and 24 cents off of every quarter. Even the penny made a little bit of money. But as the price of metals like copper rose, so did the cost of making coins. As early as 1974, the cost of making the penny was already approaching its face value.

[Roman Mars]

So the Mint futzed with the metal ratios again, just trying to make this thing for even cheaper. They upped the zinc and lowered the copper, which again worked at first, but not for long. So when Philip Diehl became the director of the US Mint in 1994, one of his main goals was to stop and ideally reverse this decline.

[Philip Diehl]

And so when I was Director of the mint 30 years ago, I was the first Mint director to recommend the elimination of the penny. And it was long overdue then.

[Roman Mars]

Unfortunately, Philip did not have the necessary sway to kill the penny. America would have to wait for someone else to make that one happen.

[Katie Thornton]

But there was another more exciting idea to boost senior edge that was being bounced around the Mint at the same time, a scheme to increase the sales of one of their biggest earners, the quarter.

[Philip Diehl]

And after a couple years, I started thinking about whether or not that was possible. And I became convinced we could do it.

[Roman Mars]

At that time, in the mid-90s, every quarter, thanks to its high face value, was still netting the mint about 22 cents in seniorage. And every year some of those quarters would fall out of circulation. People lost them accidentally threw them out or put them in coin jars. In the car. Which meant every year, the banks had to ask the Mint for more quarters to replace all those missing coins, make up the gap, and ensure that the country didn't run out of change.

[Katie Thornton]

That, of course, was good for the US Government because selling more quarters to the banks generated more seigniorage for the Mint. But what if there was a way to get people to take even more quarters out of circulation every year? Well, one way was to convince people to start collecting them.

[Roman Mars]

Only the Mint couldn't just rely on hardcore collectors like the ones I met at the convention to get the job done. The idea was to take big billions of dollars worth of quarters out of circulation. If it was ever going to do that, the Mint would somehow have to convince ordinary people, people who rarely even thought about quarters, to start collecting them, too.

[Katie Thornton]

And what better way to encourage ordinary Americans to start collecting quarters than by issuing a bunch of special designs, say 50 of them?

[Philip Diehl]

And so I'm sort of famous there for having created the 50 state quarters program.

[Katie Thornton]

Sneaky, perhaps. Elaborate, sure. Profitable, Definitely.

[Roman Mars]

The idea had been circling among coin fans for years. Canada's Mint had already done something similar, and it made money. But Philip couldn't just order the Mint to make a bunch of new designs. After all, the Mint by this point had been stamping quarters with the same design of George Washington in profile. Same since 1932. Making lots of new designs required lots more resources. To make the state quarters program happen, the Mint needed an advocate in Washington. So Philip went to a congressman from Delaware named Mike Castle and laid out his idea.

[Philip Diehl]

I said, now this has tremendous education potential. Each One of the 50 states will have designs emblematic of the state. People in the state and students will become excited about it.

[Roman Mars]

Philip told him there was no way they could do all these coins in one year. He was thinking they'd roll them out five a year for a decade. But he didn't just want to release them alphabetically.

[Philip Diehl]

That's boring. We're not teaching anybody anything.

[Katie Thornton]

Instead, Philip suggested to the congressman from Delaware that they released the coins in the order that the states ratified the Constitution.

[Philip Diehl]

And it just so happened that Delaware is the first state. And I knew that I could sell him on that with that line. And man, he bought. And he became such a champion of that. And I needed a champion.

[Roman Mars]

The Mint needed the Treasury's approval. And the treasury at the time did not like the idea. Too many things could go wrong. They wanted a study done.

[Philip Diehl]

Everybody in Washington knows that studies are designed to kill proposals. It's just Always.

[Roman Mars]

So the treasury ran some numbers. Philip and his colleagues did too. How much seniorage each quarter would net the government and also how many additional quarters they would get to sell to the banks due to people collecting them and taking them out of circulation.

[Philip Diehl]

We looked at what's going to be the incremental increase in demand for quarters from people who want to pull them out of circulation and collect them. And the models came up with a range of 2.6 billion to 3.5 billion.

[Katie Thornton]

In other words, the amount of quarters people took out and kept in their private collection would generate the government at least $2.6 billion in profit.

[Philip Diehl]

And the treasury ended up recommending the program. And man was the Deputy Secretary. I was at that meeting. And the Deputy Secretary of the treasury was hot when his hand picked committee made that recommendation.

[Katie Thornton]

Congress gave the mint the go ahead in late 1997. And just over a year later, in 1999, the state quarters went live.

[Roman Mars]

Hi ho, Kermit the Frog here announcing the new 50 state quarters from the United States Mint.

[Philip Diehl]

We employed Kermit the Frog. I wanted Kermit because he was the perfect spokes frog for our product. Because the appeal was so broad.

[Roman Mars]

Each quarter tells something about the state it represents. This one's New Jersey. It was the first time in decades that there was any significant change made to a US coin. And it was exciting, incredible buzz.

[Katie Thornton]

50 state quarters from the United States met. The most exciting change America's ever seen.

[Roman Mars]

Philip and his team had done their research. They knew people loved the treasure hunt aspect of collecting. So they worked that into the program.

[Katie Thornton]

All US coins have mint marks, little letters on the front indicating at which mint the coin was made. So they made sure every state quarter bore 1 of 2 mint P for the Philadelphia Mint or D for Denver. So people would have twice as many coins to collect.

[Roman Mars]

The states especially loved it. Governors got their constituents involved submitting design concepts and voting on their favorites.

[Philip Diehl]

And that was a brilliant marketing move because you got all this free earned publicity as each state's coin was coming up for production and people would anxiously await the coins release.

[Roman Mars]

That is true. If you were around when the stake quarters first debuted like I was, you will remember this. They were like the weather. Everyone talked about them all the time. Everyone.

[Philip Diehl]

Kids loved it, their parents loved it. We figured teenagers wouldn't care a bit. I mean, you know, we were competing with computer games. You know, how can coins compete with that? Hugely successful with teenagers too. In fact, I remember standing in lines of music concerts or restaurants and being around teenagers and young 20 year olds who'd be talking about the quarters.

[Katie Thornton]

And at times, it seemed like almost everyone collected them or at least would hold on to a few of their favorites. To this day, I am loathe to part with a Connecticut quarter. I mean, have you seen this thing? It is gorgeous.

[Roman Mars]

Soon the private market was cashing in on it too, selling all sorts of accessories.

[Caroline Turco]

Are you like me and my family,

[Roman Mars]

collecting the new US quarters?

[Caroline Turco]

Problem is, where do you put them?

[Roman Mars]

The USA Coin collection album.

[Caroline Turco]

You'll receive this unique map which features a face to hold each quarter.

[Katie Thornton]

Now you can have the perfect way

[Roman Mars]

to proudly display your collection with the

[Katie Thornton]

America's 50 state quarters wooden frame. Due to overwhelming demand for these quarters,

[Philip Diehl]

this is a limited offer for a limited time.

[Katie Thornton]

You must act now, but wait.

[Philip Diehl]

Order within the next 10 minutes and

[Katie Thornton]

we'll include a special bonus, our 50 state faxbook filled with exciting information about each call.

[Roman Mars]

Now, as planned, the coins rolled out five a year for 10 years. They made nearly 35 billion of these quarters.

[Katie Thornton]

Sadly, a stack of 35 billion quarters is not tall enough to reach the moon. We checked. Sorry, you're just going to imagine a lot of quarters.

[Roman Mars]

The program was so popular that after a decade of releases, the Mint extended the run an extra year and added the territories.

[Katie Thornton]

By the end, so many quarters had gone out of circulation that the banking system had to purchase more than twice as many quarters as it had in the 10 years before the initiative. That increase in demand netted the Mint, by conservative estimates, $2.6 billion, just as Philip's team had originally predicted.

[Roman Mars]

Am I understanding correctly that that was from the seigniorage alone?

[Philip Diehl]

Yes. Wow. Those quarters, those circulating quarters were in huge demand and were taken out of circulation. And that's where that $2.6 billion come from.

[Roman Mars]

That money went back into the Treasury's general fund, which went to lowering the tax burden and paying down the national debt. It was a huge victory and it turned a whole generation onto the magic of coins, including Caroline Turco.

[Caroline Turco]

I remember, like when the state quarters came out, I was interested for the very first time. And you know, here in this show I have, this is my sixth show and I've never seen the US Mint this busy. Never.

[Roman Mars]

In the past year, coins have been in the headlines. The US finally stopped producing the penny rip. We have new coin designs that honor the US 250th coins, whose images paint a very specific and perhaps overly generous view of early American history with designs of Pilgrims and the Mayflower. But these coins Will be around for a long time. And love em or hate em, they're probably gonna get some folks hooked on coin collecting. That's good for the mint, but they're not the only ones who want to see the hobby live on.

[Katie Thornton]

Every year, the ana who puts on the coin show Encourages collectors to do the apparent opposite of what the mint intended and put some of the more unusual coins back into circulation. But really, it's just their own way of piquing people's interest. If you ever come across an old standing liberty quarter or a wheat penny, There's a good chance you have a collector to thank for it, at which point you get to decide, what's this coin worth to you?

[Roman Mars]

Ultimately, the state quarters program did something similar, Just on a much bigger scale. It got so many of us feeling sentimental about these little hunks of copper and nickel, not just the coin nerds. I didn't have a set of state quarters, but my neighbor did. He had a book and everything. And when I found a state quarter, I'd gasp, put it in my pocket, and run over to Andy's house to see if he had Wisconsin yet. He always had Wisconsin. He always had whatever I found. But together, we took plenty of quarters out of circulation. The state quarters turned us all into numismatists. It put the collecting bug in all of us, at least a little bit. So when I was in Savannah, I bought a coin minted just a stone's throw away from beautiful uptown Oakland park, California.

[Katie Thornton]

It's an s. San Francisco mint quarter, so it's never been in circulation.

[Roman Mars]

I've learned in the coin world that when people say it's in mint condition, they mean it literally. Like, someone got this from the mint and it never made the rounds. This one was made in 1951. That means it's almost all silver, and it has this really nice, bright sheen. But if you just glanced at this coin casually, There's a good chance you wouldn't think anything of it. I wouldn't have. Just a few months ago. I think I'd like to get this never circulated one from 1951.

[Jesse Kraft]

Okay.

[Roman Mars]

Okay. I got this quarter for $20. That's $4 over the intrinsic value, $19.75 over the face value. But I'm not planning on holding onto it for long. Call me a sucker, but I think this coin, this little piece of history, Deserves to be out in the wild.

[Katie Thornton]

You're gonna put it in circulation?

[Roman Mars]

I'm thinking I might.

[Philip Diehl]

Okay.

[Roman Mars]

Just to see if. To just think about somebody picking it up down the line.

[Paul Jackson]

Absolutely. That's cool.

[Roman Mars]

Okay, let's do it.

[Philip Diehl]

All right.

[Roman Mars]

Funny question, but do you take cash?

[Katie Thornton]

When we return, the story of one state quarter that might not have been worth it. Today's episode is brought to you by Aquasana One easy way to live healthier is to hydrate smarter and smarter Hydration starts with Aquasana. With Aquasana water filters, you get healthier, odor free water that tastes amazing. Their advanced filtration removes harmful contaminants while preserving beneficial minerals, so better hydration comes with every sip. And it's not just drinking water. Aquasana protects your home and your health with a full range of whole house, under sink and shower filtration systems. Whether you're washing veggies, making coffee, or rinsing off after a workout, experience the difference in every drop. With Aquasana, I have an under sink model that I put in myself. It's easy. Super easy to install. In fact, as soon as you open a box, you know exactly what to do. It's that simple. The water tastes great and one psychological benefit. I swear to you I'm just drinking more water after I put one in. You put one in and you will remember to drink water and be healthier. Instead of grabbing some soda or something from the fridge, visit aquasana.com and use promo code invisible for up to 50% off select systems. That's a Q U-A S A N A.com promo code invisible Aquasana Healthy living starts with healthy water At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones Member, SIPC this podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is an all in one website platform that helps you stand out online. Whether you're just getting started or growing your business. It's got everything you need from securing your domain to building a professional site and showcasing your work. All in one place. Bring your vision to life with AI powered design or curated templates, plus flexible editing tools that help you create something that truly reflects your style. No experience needed. Squarespace makes it easy to share your work, book clients and get paid with built in tools for scheduling, invoicing and email. All in one place. I've had a Squarespace site Romanmars.com for 12 years or so. And the key for me isn't that it was easy to build, although it was, is that it's easy to to maintain. It never gives me any trouble at all. It's great. Head to squarespace.com invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use offer code Invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. The key to running a small business is to be available and reliable. AT&T business helps small businesses stay connected with reliable Internet built to support daily operations. Connectivity keeps everything moving from communication to transactions to daily workflows. AT&T business is designed to be a reliable provider helping small businesses stay up and running without added stress or disruption. Powered by AT&T Business built to work. Get AT and t [e-mail] so we're back with Katie Thornton. Hey Katie.

[Roman Mars]

Hey Rauman.

[Katie Thornton]

So we talked about how the state quarters program works and how they made money for the government. But I hear you have a story about the design of the quarters.

[Roman Mars]

Yes, I have a story of an adventure or maybe a misadventure in state quarter design. But before we get there, I want to just look at all the quarter designs really quick. I sent you a link that has all of the special quarters.

[Katie Thornton]

Yes, okay. I see them all arrayed in front of me.

[Roman Mars]

All 50, 56, 56, 56. Don't forget D.C. and the territories. We've got em all. So if you open em up, I mean, do any stick out to you?

[Katie Thornton]

Let's see. I like the bison on Kansas quite a bit.

[Roman Mars]

I like the bison. One strong image.

[Katie Thornton]

Yeah, yeah. It's clear that the ones that work the best are kind of trying to put together one cohesive image. Like Florida has like a ship and the space shuttle and some palm trees and stuff. And it just looks like a weird patchwork of clip art, you know, and that is not doing it for me.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, I agree. And I think it sort of makes me think about flag design a little bit in that, you know, you want to sort of strive for cleanness and simplicity, sort of like communicating a clear message in as few images as you can.

[Katie Thornton]

Yeah, no, I think that there's some similarities. I think the differences are that, you know, quarters are meant to be enjoyed. You know, looking at up close. Engraving is a real fine, detailed art form. So yeah, I'm open to these being much more complicated. I do like them to have a kind of cohesive, I don't know Composition and feel to them, I think that's the main thing. But, like, there's just something about them that's just lovely.

[Roman Mars]

I agree.

[Paul Jackson]

Yeah.

[Roman Mars]

But, Roman, I wanted to tell you about one person who I interviewed who really did not like the design of one of these quarters. Missouri.

[Katie Thornton]

Missouri. Okay. Okay, Let me pull up Missouri and see if I can get a gander of Missouri.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah. For those of us who are not, you know, familiar with the design of the Missouri State Quarter, do you. Will you give us a little description?

[Katie Thornton]

Yeah, sure. It has the gateway arch there and has trees. So there's sort of anachronistic combination of the arch and trees and what looks like a depiction of the Lewis and Clark expedition. So it looks like that's kind of their claim to fame with this quarter is the beginning of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah. Right. So it's sort of like a handful of different things that are iconically Missouri.

[Katie Thornton]

Yeah.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah. It's definitely not, like, hideous.

[Katie Thornton]

No.

[Roman Mars]

But the person who was really upset about this coin design was the artist who submitted the original design concept. His name is Paul Jackson, and he's a well known watercolor painter in Columbia, Missouri. And here's how he describes that coin.

[Paul Jackson]

My original design was sort of an elegant symbol. It had two people in a canoe, and it had the arch, you know, sort of fading into the mist in the background.

[Katie Thornton]

I mean, that sounds like in the spirit of what we're looking at. So what is the problem? Like, what did they change that he doesn't like?

[Roman Mars]

Well, yeah, I mean, the overall design concept stayed the same, but Paul says the devil is in the details. Like, take the arch, for example.

[Paul Jackson]

In the US Mintz version, it looks like it's crossing the river from Illinois to Missouri, and it's shaped like a McDonald's french fry bent over. It's very misshapen.

[Katie Thornton]

Well, I mean, it looks like an arch, but maybe it's not a factually accurate arch. I could understand this is like the issues with depicting things on coins. But does he have other issues with the design?

[Roman Mars]

Yes, he certainly does.

[Paul Jackson]

Instead of two guys in a canoe, it had three. Larry, Moe and Curly. They're going downhill upriver. And the arch crosses the river from Illinois to Missouri. Plus the trees are made of broccoli.

[Roman Mars]

Plus the trees are made of broccoli.

[Katie Thornton]

Okay, so he doesn't like the way the trees are drawn, which I. When you say that they look like broccoli. They do look like broccoli. I can see what he's talking about. So, you know, how did these changes get included into the final design? Based off of his original painting?

[Roman Mars]

Yeah. So Paul submitted his original design for the Missouri State Quarter Contest to the First Lady's office, which was running the Competition back in 2005. Won. He had collected coins as a kid, and he thought his design would be a cool way to honor the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. So he was really stoked when he won. And for a while, not much happened. He says he didn't hear anything. But then in the spring of the following year, he got a message.

[Paul Jackson]

I got the first email from someone in Georgia saying, what do you think about what the US Mint did to your state quarter design? And at that point, I had no idea. I didn't know what the US Mint had done to my state quarter design.

[Roman Mars]

The Mint's design looked kind of like Paul's, but Paul and others thought it was just really ugly.

[Paul Jackson]

There was clearly something wrong. They dumbed it down to the point where it was unacceptable. It was just unusable. And they misspelled the word bicentennial.

[Katie Thornton]

Well, they must have fixed that, right?

[Roman Mars]

I would hope so. But they did eventually just get rid of that word altogether.

[Katie Thornton]

Well, good. Did they offer any explanation as to why the design changed and, like, you know what the redesign process was like?

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, you know, Paul says he didn't get much from them. The Mint said it was uncoinable. And they said that Paul didn't understand, like, metal flow and things like this.

[Katie Thornton]

Oh, sure.

[Roman Mars]

And I guess multiple private mints who make, you know, special tokens and things like that reached out to him, and they were like, oh, this is coinable. We would love to make it.

[Philip Diehl]

Huh. Huh.

[Roman Mars]

But Paul says from the Mint, they just sort of sprung these design changes on him. Wow.

[Katie Thornton]

Paul doesn't seem like he was a person that was going to let this go.

[Roman Mars]

No, he was not going to let this go. He was not going down without a fight.

[Paul Jackson]

So I gathered a few of my supporters and went to protest. And so I put out the call on AOL and invited anybody who was upset about it to join me at the State capitol. And about 50 people showed up. They all had little signs. The U.S. mint lied. They've Stolen state pride. Things like that.

[Katie Thornton]

I mean, I love this scene so much, but did the protest, like, actually accomplish anything?

[Roman Mars]

Well, it would have been a dud, because what Paul didn't realize was that the state legislature wasn't actually in session at the time. But one thing that Paul did at this protest was he took about 20 quarters, just normal quarters. Because, you know, at this point the Missouri state quarter hadn't actually come out yet. They'd just been publicizing the design. And he printed up some round stickers with his Missouri quarter design on it. And he stuck it on the tail side of these 20 or so quarters.

[Paul Jackson]

And the next morning I was dead asleep and got a phone call from somebody at the Kansas City Star. And this reporter said, how does it feel to be under Secret Service investigation for defacing money? And the first word out of my mouth was awesome.

[Roman Mars]

That's how you felt?

[Paul Jackson]

Yep. Because I knew at that moment we had gotten traction. So I printed 250,000 more stickers and I put them on the back of 250,000 quarters.

[Katie Thornton]

Whoa. Really?

[Roman Mars]

I mean, that's Paul's telling of it. That's more than $60,000 in quarters.

[Katie Thornton]

Yow.

[Roman Mars]

He said sometimes they would just go to the bank and get rolls of quarters and sticker them up and then return them to the bank.

[Katie Thornton]

Amazing.

[Roman Mars]

I mean, he's like, there's quite a lot of dedication here. But he didn't just return them all to the bank. Like, he would also use them to sort of continue his protest, to bring his protest to a broader sphere.

[Paul Jackson]

So we took the show on the road and went to D.C. and spent nothing but rolls of stickered quarters for gas, food and lodging the entire way.

[Katie Thornton]

That is amazing. That is amazing. I love that the coin collector types put things into circulation to make a point.

[Roman Mars]

Totally. I agree. I had to double down and clarify this with him. Like, hold on, nothing but quarters. You paid for your hotel room and quarters not once, but every night. And gas.

[Katie Thornton]

Wow.

[Roman Mars]

And also, they didn't just do that when they got to dc. They rolled this giant four foot diameter foam quarter with his design from the White House to the US Mint. And the press did love this.

[Caroline Turco]

An artist from Columbia, Missouri is upset that the US Mint has rejected his design for the state quarter. He's protesting by putting stickers with his design on the back of real quarters. Today he'll be handing out those sticker covered quarters in front of the US treasury building here in Washington.

[Katie Thornton]

This is such a NPR story.

[Roman Mars]

Just the straight read. I love it.

[Katie Thornton]

I mean, it's just a fat slow pitch down the middle for NPR and for us.

[Roman Mars]

Here we are.

[Katie Thornton]

But he mentions that the Secret Service was investigating him. So this is like a question of defacing money. Is this something that he could actually get in trouble for?

[Roman Mars]

Okay, so he says he went to the Secret Service headquarters.

[Paul Jackson]

We tried to turn ourselves in. And apparently the Secret Service doesn't listen to NPR or something, but they said we don't have any record of you. Get out of our building.

[Katie Thornton]

I love it. He's like, arrest me. I love that. He's just trying to be. You know, he's just trying to provoke them to have something happen just so we can kick up enough dust to make this a thing.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, I think he's got a real sense of story and drama.

[Katie Thornton]

Oh, absolutely.

[Roman Mars]

But ultimately, the type of defacing money that he was doing, it's not illegal. He's not trying to profit from it. So, you know, it's just legally not. Not an issue.

[Katie Thornton]

And so did any of this. I mean, you showed me the final quarter, so I know Paul didn't get, you know, most of his original design back on the quarter, but did his protests ultimately have any influence on the design process?

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, I mean, it was like this whole hubbub. And so the Mint did keep offering redesigns, but, you know, Paul just was never really happy with what they did, and the whole thing left a bit of a bitter taste in his mouth.

[Paul Jackson]

I divested of my coin collection during this entire process because I learned that basically I was the savings account for the US Mint. They anticipate that you will take sets of those state quarters out of circulation,

[Katie Thornton]

plus the $60,000 worth of quarters that he bought to add his painting to the backup. So he created even more seniorage opportunities for the federal government through the quarter program without even probably intending.

[Roman Mars]

Right. Yeah, there's definitely a big irony here. And also just throughout this whole saga, he made the Missouri state quarter and those sticker quarters really hot commodities, like people definitely took them out of circulation, and that's a win for the Mint.

[Katie Thornton]

So if it's like, whether it's artist approved or not, the quarters did their job, at least in the eyes of the Mint.

[Jesse Kraft]

Totally.

[Roman Mars]

Though Paul doesn't really think it's quite so black and white, because I asked him about that. I asked him who won, him or the Mint.

[Paul Jackson]

Oh, I totally won.

[Katie Thornton]

Are you kidding?

[Paul Jackson]

I had a blast. And they created more opportunities for me than they cost me.

[Katie Thornton]

I really. I'm just part of the Paul fan club at this point. What a guy.

[Roman Mars]

What a guy. Thank you, Paul. Thank you for your diligent effort fighting for your coin.

[Katie Thornton]

Well, Katie Thornton, thank you so much for this. I had a great time making this episode with you.

[Roman Mars]

Thanks so much, roman. Me too.

[Katie Thornton]

99% invisible was reported this week by Katie Thornton and edited by Joe Rosenberg. Mixed by Martin Gonzalez Music by Swan Real Fact checking by Sona Avakian Kathy Tu is our Executive producer, Kurt Kohlstedt is the Digital Director. Delaney hall is our Senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Farube, Jason De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivienne Leigh, Lashma Dawn Kelly Prime Jacob Adena Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley and and me, roman Mars. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of [e-mail].

[Caroline Turco]

Not sure if you have the experience to start your dream job. Good news these days it's the skills that count. Udemy can help you get those in demand. Skills Want to be an AI mastermind? Learn with us Game Developer We've got you covered. AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner. We can help you prep. You'll learn from real world experts who learn Love what they do so that you can love what you do. Go to udemy.com for the skills to get you started and get set for your dream job.

[Roman Mars]

Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co founder of angie and one thing I've learned is that you buy a house but you make it a home. Because with every fix, update and renovation it becomes a little more your own. So you need all your jobs done well. For nearly 30 years, Angie has helped millions of homeowners hire skilled pro for the projects that matter, from plumbing to electrical roof repair to deck upgrades. So leave it to the pros who will get your jobs done well. Angie the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your [e-mail] in the US there's a break in every 26 seconds, but when intruders step near

[Caroline Turco]

Simplisafe home security steps up.

[Paul Jackson]

Stop.

[Katie Thornton]

This is Simplisafe. Police are on the way.

[Roman Mars]

Using AI alerts U.

[Caroline Turco]

S based live agents help deter break inside Simplisafe. No long term contracts. Save 50% on your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com sxm or with

[Katie Thornton]

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