Melting silver is one thing. Making good coins is quite another. The first really good British coins, with totally uniform diameter, thickness, and design, mil

Melting silver is one thing. Making good coins is quite another. The first really good British coins, with totally uniform diameter, thickness, and design, milled edges, and so on, were made by (once again) Isaac Newton. There had been coins of a sort for well over a thousand years by then, but they basically sucked. They were essentially raw lumps of metal that had a design hand-hammered into them. They looked more like a bad sealing wax impression than anything we'd recognize as a coin today. Identifying a good coin was difficult.