Melbourne Mint
The Melbourne Mint, in Melbourne, was a branch of the British Royal Mint. It minted gold sovereigns from 1872 until 1931, half-sovereigns from 1873 until 1915. In 1916 it commenced minting Commonwealth silver threepences, sixpences and florins. From 1923 it minted all pre-decimal denominations, it minted rarities such as the 1921/22 overdate threepence, 1923 half-penny and 1930 penny, as well as Australia's four commemorative florins in 1927, 1934/35, 1951 and 1954. It assisted the Royal Australian Mint in Canberra in producing one cent coins from 1966 to 1968 and two cent coins in 1966. From 1969 all coin production moved to the Royal Australian Mint in Canberra, the building housing the coin minting equipment was demolished shortly afterwards; the remaining administrative building is now the home of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, has been leased to the private sector since 2001. The former Royal Mint is located on the corner of William and La Trobe Streets and is of architectural significance as one of the most impressive 19th century government buildings in Victoria, one of few Australian buildings in the true Renaissance revival style, a virtual copy of the Palazzo Vidoni-Caffarelli, attributed to Raphael, in Rome.
The mint was built between 1869 and 1872 to the designs of architect J. J Clark whose other notable works included Melbourne, it was opened 12 June 1872The colourful coat of arms placed on the front gates in mid-twentieth century were by the Melbourne woodcarver Walter Langcake. The original design, based on Queen Victoria's coat of arms, is adapted for a British Royal Mint branch office in colonial Victoria; the supporting animals are not crowned and a maned horse replaces the usual unicorn. Current tenants Melbourne Mint A private company, Melbourne Mint Pty Ltd, is situated on the ground level and level one of the Melbourne Mint building. Melbourne Mint Pty Ltd belongs to a group of Australian precious metals companies which include Australian Bullion Company, Gold Merchants International and Universal Coin Co, it has no historical relationship to the original Royal Mint. List of mints Photo: Melbourne Mint, from the State Library of Victoria Brief history and photographs of the Melbourne Mint, from the Australian Architecture Discussion Forum.
Melbourne Mint - Online Coin Club, list of all coins struck by the Melbourne Mint
George Temple-Poole
George Thomas Temple-Poole was a British architect and public servant known for his work in Western Australia from 1885. As Principal Architect, Western Australia, in a period of rapid urban development during the Australian gold boom, he made notable contributions to Australian architecture and town planning prior to federation, his designs for public space and buildings are identified and preserved by local councils and heritage registers. He held roles relating to town planning, the arts, and'society' of Western Australia, his founding and chairing of committees and institutions included. George Temple-Poole was born in Rome, Italy to Louise Mary, née Poole, John George Temple, a Lieutenant Colonel in the British Army. Poole's father died shortly after the family returned to England following the Crimean War, his mother remarried. He was educated at Winchester College in England. Articled in engineering and architecture to a London engineering firm designing harbour works for the River Thames, he practised in Ceylon for two years before being appointed to the Public Works Department in Western Australia.
Poole designed a'series' of public buildings that were constructed in and around ports and suburbs of Western Australia during the Federation Period c. 1890 – c. 1915. While his work was influenced by contemporary British movements, Poole contributed in the development of the Australian architectural response to environment and circumstances, he provided a unifying style to the public buildings as government established its presence throughout Western Australia. His buildings influenced non-residential architecture in the state regional centres. Poole was an artist, painting in watercolours and oils and was the founder of the Wilgie Sketching Club, he was a prominent Freemason and member of the Weld Club, an important member of the Perth establishment. In June 1902, Poole ran for parliament, he placed fifth out of five candidates. Appointed by the British government as a supervisor for the Public Works department in 1885, he became head of department in 1889 assistant-engineer-in-chief and Principal Architect, Western Australia.
The discovery and exploitation of gold and other mineral wealth during his period resulted in increased migration and associated commerce. Prior to this, the colony state's growth was modest in comparison, his designs for were built in emerging towns, sometimes in remote areas such as the north west of Australia. One of his first projects was its port Cossack; the gaol complex, designed in 1886, for that place was an'unusual octagonal' design and featured the use of verandahs, planned siting in a complex, locally quarried freestone walls and slave labour by those to be incarcerated. In 1894 Temple-Poole created design standards for'official' and'public' buildings including banks and assay offices, etc. in the'gold boom' towns Coolgardie, Marble Bar and Cue and the main staging town for the goldfields, York. The goldfields works were sometimes the first permanent structure in locations occupied by'shantie' and other improvised buildings thereby creating centres of government and commerce in what became larger towns and cities in Western Australia.
The siting or replacing of courts, police stations and other buildings around the state was occurring at this time, following the establishment of'responsible government' from Perth. He supervised and designed new buildings or additions for the established towns Albany and York, the port: Fremantle, the centre of government: Perth, other parts of Western Australia. To meet the increased population, post offices, schools and town halls were constructed in this period. Architectural reference was made to earlier colonial buildings, gracefully acknowledging the prior colonial architects, but existing ones were removed to site the new plan. Large scale harbour and other planning schemes were realised during his time as'government architect', these required new buildings and structures. Poole's work contained a variety of design approaches that could display the new government's authority or facilitate public works and schemes; the Lands Department building in Cathedral Avenue, Perth is in the classic tradition.
In contrast, plans such as the identical village railway precincts of Claremont and Walkaway have been identified as examples of Federation Arts and Crafts. Claremont was to become a population centre ` halfway' between the port of the city. Walkaway, the end of a 400 km railway line from Perth, was abandoned, becoming a tourist destination occupied only by National Trust guides. Other Federation Arts and crafts buildings include the York railway station buildings, the York Hospital, the Albany Cottage Hospital, the Fremantle Arts Centre Southern extensions, the Claremont Police Station and other buildings such as the York Post Office and residence contain Federation Arts and crafts features. Poole resigned from the position of government architect in 1897 but returned from 1900–1902 to finalise works on the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme after the death of its author C Y O'Connor. After resigning from this position he continued to have an important role in public life.
Manufacturing
Manufacturing is the production of products for use or sale using labour and machines, tools and biological processing, or formulation. The term may refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high tech, but is most applied to industrial design, in which raw materials are transformed into finished goods on a large scale; such finished goods may be sold to other manufacturers for the production of other, more complex products, such as aircraft, household appliances, sports equipment or automobiles, or sold to wholesalers, who in turn sell them to retailers, who sell them to end users and consumers. Manufacturing engineering or manufacturing process are the steps through which raw materials are transformed into a final product; the manufacturing process begins with the product design, materials specification from which the product is made. These materials are modified through manufacturing processes to become the required part. Modern manufacturing includes all intermediate processes required in the production and integration of a product's components.
Some industries, such as semiconductor and steel manufacturers use the term fabrication instead. The manufacturing sector is connected with engineering and industrial design. Examples of major manufacturers in North America include General Motors Corporation, General Electric, Procter & Gamble, General Dynamics, Boeing and Precision Castparts. Examples in Europe include Volkswagen Siemens, FCA and Michelin. Examples in Asia include Toyota, Panasonic, LG, Samsung and Tata Motors. In its earliest form, manufacturing was carried out by a single skilled artisan with assistants. Training was by apprenticeship. In much of the pre-industrial world, the guild system protected the privileges and trade secrets of urban artisans. Before the Industrial Revolution, most manufacturing occurred in rural areas, where household-based manufacturing served as a supplemental subsistence strategy to agriculture. Entrepreneurs organized a number of manufacturing households into a single enterprise through the putting-out system.
Toll manufacturing is an arrangement whereby a first firm with specialized equipment processes raw materials or semi-finished goods for a second firm. Manufacturing Engineering Agile manufacturing American system of manufacturing British factory system of manufacturing Craft or guild system Fabrication Flexible manufacturing Just-in-time manufacturing Lean manufacturing Mass customization – 3D printing, design-your-own web sites for sneakers, fast fashion Mass production Ownership Packaging and labeling Prefabrication Putting-out system Rapid manufacturing Reconfigurable manufacturing system Soviet collectivism in manufacturing History of numerical control Emerging technologies have provided some new growth in advanced manufacturing employment opportunities in the Manufacturing Belt in the United States. Manufacturing provides important material support for national infrastructure and for national defense. On the other hand, most manufacturing may involve significant environmental costs; the clean-up costs of hazardous waste, for example, may outweigh the benefits of a product that creates it.
Hazardous materials may expose workers to health risks. These costs are now well known and there is effort to address them by improving efficiency, reducing waste, using industrial symbiosis, eliminating harmful chemicals; the negative costs of manufacturing can be addressed legally. Developed countries regulate manufacturing activity with environmental laws. Across the globe, manufacturers can be subject to regulations and pollution taxes to offset the environmental costs of manufacturing activities. Labor unions and craft guilds have played a historic role in the negotiation of worker rights and wages. Environment laws and labor protections that are available in developed nations may not be available in the third world. Tort law and product liability impose additional costs on manufacturing; these are significant dynamics in the ongoing process, occurring over the last few decades, of manufacture-based industries relocating operations to "developing-world" economies where the costs of production are lower than in "developed-world" economies.
Manufacturing has unique health and safety challenges and has been recognized by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health as a priority industry sector in the National Occupational Research Agenda to identify and provide intervention strategies regarding occupational health and safety issues. Surveys and analyses of trends and issues in manufacturing and investment around the world focus on such things as: The nature and sources of the considerable variations that occur cross-nationally in levels of manufacturing and wider industrial-economic growth. In addition to general overviews, researchers have examined the features and factors affecting particular key aspects of manufacturing development, they have compared production and investment in a range of Western and non-Western countries and presented case studies of growth and performance in important individual industries and market-economic sectors. On June 26, 2009, Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, called for the United States to increase its manufacturing base employment to 20% of the workforce, commenting that the U.
S. has outsourced too much in some areas and can no longer rely on the financial sector and consumer spending to drive demand. Further, while U. S. manufacturing performs well compared to the rest of the U. S. economy, research shows that it performs poorly compared to manufacturing in other high-wage countries. A total of 3.2 million – one in six U. S. manuf
Numismatics
Numismatics is the study or collection of currency, including coins, paper money and related objects. While numismatists are characterised as students or collectors of coins, the discipline includes the broader study of money and other payment media used to resolve debts and the exchange of goods. Early money used by people is referred to as "Odd and Curious", but the use of other goods in barter exchange is excluded where used as a circulating currency; the Kyrgyz people gave small change in lambskins. Many objects have been used for centuries, such as cowry shells, precious metals, cocoa beans, large stones and gems. Today, most transactions take place by a form of payment with either inherent, standardized, or credit value. Numismatic value is the value in excess of the monetary value conferred by law, known as the collector value. Economic and historical studies of money's use and development are an integral part of the numismatists' study of money's physical embodiment. First attested in English 1829, the word numismatics comes from the adjective numismatic, meaning "of coins".
It was borrowed in 1792 from French numismatiques, itself a derivation from Late Latin numismatis, genitive of numisma, a variant of nomisma meaning "coin". Nomisma is a latinisation of the Greek νόμισμα which means "current coin/custom", which derives from νομίζω, "to hold or own as a custom or usage, to use customarily", in turn from νόμος, "usage, custom" from νέμω, "I dispense, assign, hold". Throughout its history, money itself has been made to be a scarce good, although it does not have to be. Many materials have been used to form money, from scarce precious metals and cowry shells through cigarettes to artificial money, called fiat money, such as banknotes. Many complementary currencies use time as a unit of measure, using mutual credit accounting that keeps the balance of money intact. Modern money is a token – an abstraction. Paper currency is the most common type of physical money today. However, goods such as gold or silver retain many of the essential properties of money, such as volatility and limited supply.
However, these goods are not controlled by one single authority. Coin collecting may have existed in ancient times. Caesar Augustus gave "coins of every device, including old pieces of the kings and foreign money" as Saturnalia gifts. Petrarch, who wrote in a letter that he was approached by vinediggers with old coins asking him to buy or to identify the ruler, is credited as the first Renaissance collector. Petrarch presented a collection of Roman coins to Emperor Charles IV in 1355; the first book on coins was De Asse et Partibus by Guillaume Budé. During the early Renaissance ancient coins were collected by European nobility. Collectors of coins were Pope Boniface VIII, Emperor Maximilian of the Holy Roman Empire, Louis XIV of France, Ferdinand I, Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg who started the Berlin coin cabinet and Henry IV of France to name a few. Numismatics is called the "Hobby of Kings", due to its most esteemed founders. Professional societies organised in the 19th century; the Royal Numismatic Society was founded in 1836 and began publishing the journal that became the Numismatic Chronicle.
The American Numismatic Society was founded in 1858 and began publishing the American Journal of Numismatics in 1866. In 1931 the British Academy launched the Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum publishing collections of Ancient Greek coinage; the first volume of Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles was published in 1958. In the 20th century coins gained recognition as archaeological objects, scholars such as Guido Bruck of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna realised their value in providing a temporal context and the difficulty that curators faced when identifying worn coins using classical literature. After World War II in Germany a project, Fundmünzen der Antike was launched, to register every coin found within Germany; this idea found successors in many countries. In the United States, the US mint established a coin Cabinet in 1838 when chief coiner Adam Eckfeldt donated his personal collection. William E. Du Bois’ Pledges of History... describes the cabinet. C. Wyllys Betts' American colonial history illustrated by contemporary medals set the groundwork for the study of American historical medals.
Helen Wang's "A short history of Chinese numismatics in European languages" gives an outline history of Western countries' understanding of Chinese numismatics. Lyce Jankowski's Les amis des monnaies is an in-depth study of Chinese numismatics in China in the 19th century. Modern numismatics is the study of the coins of the mid-17th century onward, the period of machine-struck coins, their study serves more the need of collectors than historians and it is more successfully pursued by amateur aficionados than by professional scholars. The focus of modern numismatics lies in the research of production and use of money in historical contexts using mint or other records in order to determine the relative rarity of the coins they study. Varieties, mint-made errors, the results of progressive die wear, mintage figures and the sociopolitical context of coin mintings are matters of interest. Exonumia is the study of coin-like objects such as token coins and medals, other items used in place of legal currency or for commemoration.
This includes elongated coins, encased coins, souvenir medallions, badges, counterstamped coins
Half sovereign
The half sovereign is an English and British gold coin with a face value half that of a sovereign: equivalent to half a pound sterling, ten shillings, or 120 old pence. Since the end of the gold standard, it has been issued only in limited quantities as a commemorative coin with a sale price and resale value far in excess of its face value; the main reason for this is because they are used, along with other coins of this type, as bullion coins. Common date half sovereigns tend to be worth more than melt value; the half sovereign was first introduced in 1544 under Henry VIII. After 1604, the issue of half sovereigns, along with gold sovereigns, was discontinued until 1817, following a major revision of British coinage. Production continued until 1926 and, apart from special issues for coronation years, was not restarted until 1980, it was used extensively in Australia, until 1933. Modern half sovereigns, from 1817 onwards, have a diameter of 19.30 mm, a thickness of c. 0.99 mm, a weight of 3.99 g, are made of 22 carat crown gold alloy, contain 0.1176 troy ounces of gold.
The reverse side, featuring St. George slaying a dragon was designed by Benedetto Pistrucci, whose initials appear to the right of the date; the half sovereign is a "protected coin" for the purposes of Part II of the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981. British Coins - Free information about British coins. Includes an online forum. Online Coin Club / Coins from United Kingdom / Half Sovereign
Cryptocurrency
A cryptocurrency is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses strong cryptography to secure financial transactions, control the creation of additional units, verify the transfer of assets. Cryptocurrencies use decentralized control as opposed to centralized digital currency and central banking systems; the decentralized control of each cryptocurrency works through distributed ledger technology a blockchain, that serves as a public financial transaction database. Bitcoin, first released as open-source software in 2009, is considered the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Since the release of bitcoin, over 4,000 altcoins have been created. In 1983, the American cryptographer David Chaum conceived an anonymous cryptographic electronic money called ecash. In 1995, he implemented it through Digicash, an early form of cryptographic electronic payments which required user software in order to withdraw notes from a bank and designate specific encrypted keys before it can be sent to a recipient.
This allowed the digital currency to be untraceable by the issuing bank, the government, or any third party. In 1996, the NSA published a paper entitled How to Make a Mint: the Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash, describing a Cryptocurrency system first publishing it in a MIT mailing list and in 1997, in The American Law Review. In 1998, Wei Dai published a description of "b-money", characterized as an anonymous, distributed electronic cash system. Shortly thereafter, Nick Szabo described bit gold. Like bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that would follow it, bit gold was described as an electronic currency system which required users to complete a proof of work function with solutions being cryptographically put together and published. A currency system based on a reusable proof of work was created by Hal Finney who followed the work of Dai and Szabo; the first decentralized cryptocurrency, was created in 2009 by pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto. It used a cryptographic hash function, as its proof-of-work scheme.
In April 2011, Namecoin was created as an attempt at forming a decentralized DNS, which would make internet censorship difficult. Soon after, in October 2011, Litecoin was released, it was the first successful cryptocurrency to use scrypt as its hash function instead of SHA-256. Another notable cryptocurrency, Peercoin was the first to use a proof-of-work/proof-of-stake hybrid. On 6 August 2014, the UK announced its Treasury had been commissioned to do a study of cryptocurrencies, what role, if any, they can play in the UK economy; the study was to report on whether regulation should be considered. According to Jan Lansky, a cryptocurrency is a system that meets six conditions: The system does not require a central authority, its state is maintained through distributed consensus; the system keeps an overview of their ownership. The system defines. If new cryptocurrency units can be created, the system defines the circumstances of their origin and how to determine the ownership of these new units.
Ownership of cryptocurrency units can be proved cryptographically. The system allows transactions to be performed in which ownership of the cryptographic units is changed. A transaction statement can only be issued by an entity proving the current ownership of these units. If two different instructions for changing the ownership of the same cryptographic units are entered, the system performs at most one of them. In March 2018, the word cryptocurrency was added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary; the term altcoin has various similar definitions. Stephanie Yang of The Wall Street Journal defined altcoins as "alternative digital currencies," while Paul Vigna of The Wall Street Journal, described altcoins as alternative versions of bitcoin. Aaron Hankins of the MarketWatch refers to any cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin as altcoins. A blockchain account can provide functions other than making payments, for example in decentralized applications or smart contracts. In this case, the units or coins are sometimes referred to as crypto tokens.
Decentralized cryptocurrency is produced by the entire cryptocurrency system collectively, at a rate, defined when the system is created and, publicly known. In centralized banking and economic systems such as the Federal Reserve System, corporate boards or governments control the supply of currency by printing units of fiat money or demanding additions to digital banking ledgers. In case of decentralized cryptocurrency, companies or governments cannot produce new units, have not so far provided backing for other firms, banks or corporate entities which hold asset value measured in it; the underlying technical system upon which decentralized cryptocurrencies are based was created by the group or individual known as Satoshi Nakamoto. As of May 2018, over 1,800 cryptocurrency specifications existed. Within a cryptocurrency system, the safety and balance of ledgers is maintained by a community of mutually distrustful parties referred to as miners: who use their computers to help validate and timestamp transactions, adding them to the ledger in accordance with a particular timestamping scheme.
Most cryptocurrencies are designed to decrease production of that currency, placing a cap on the total amount of that currency that will be in circulation. Compared with ordinary currencies held by financial institutions or kept as cash on hand, cryptocurrencies can be more difficult for seizure by law enforcement; this difficulty is derived from lev
Coolgardie, Western Australia
Coolgardie is a small town in Western Australia, 558 kilometres east of the state capital, Perth. It has a population of 850 people. Although Coolgardie is now known to most Western Australians as a tourist town and a mining ghost town, it was once the third largest town in Western Australia. At this time, mining of alluvial gold was a major industry and supplied the flagging economy with new hope. Many miners suffered under the harsh conditions, but for a few, their finds made the hard work worthwhile. Most men, left poorer than they had started off, with their hopes dashed; the town was founded in 1892. Australia had seen several major gold rushes over the previous three decades centred on the east coast, but these had been exhausted by the 1890s. With the discovery of a new goldfield, an entire new gold rush began, with thousands flocking to the area. By 1898, Coolgardie was the third largest town in the colony, with an estimated population of 5,008. At its peak, 700 mining companies based in Coolgardie were registered with the London Stock Exchange.
The town supported a wide variety of businesses and services, including the railway connection between Perth and Kalgoorlie, a swimming pool, many hotels and several newspapers. The value of Coolgardie to the colony in the late 1890s was so significant that it was used as leverage to force Western Australia to join the Australian federation - Britain and the eastern colonies threatened to create a new state to be named Auralia around Coolgardie and other regional goldfields, such as Kalgoorlie, if the government in Perth did not agree to hold a referendum on federation; the Western Australian government reluctantly complied and a referendum was held just in time to become a founding state in the new federation. When federation did occur in 1901, Coolgardie was the centre of a federal electorate, the Division of Coolgardie. Soon after in November 1901, Alf Morgans from the state electorate of Coolgardie became Premier of Western Australia. Albert Thomas of Coolgardie, was elected the first Member of Dundas, an electoral division south of Coolgardie.
However, the gold began to decrease in the early 1900s, by World War I, the town was in serious decline. The federal electorate was abolished in 1913 due to the diminished population, as many of its residents left for other towns where the gold was still plentiful, it soon ceased to be a municipality; the situation remained unchanged throughout the century, as its population slipped to around 200 and it became a virtual ghost town. An example of this decline is that, in March 1896, Coolgardie's main street was lit by an electric light, but by April 1924, the same street was lit by four hurricane lamps. Despite this, many of the buildings from the town's peak were retained, which in recent years has helped start a small revival in the town's fortunes; the development of a tourist industry has once again created some employment in the town, resulting in a small increase in population. Coolgardie appears to be no longer in danger of dying; when the Coolgardie gold rush occurred in 1894, the Afghan cameleers were quick to move in.
The goldfields could not have continued without the water they transported. In March that year, a caravan of six Afghans, forty-seven camels and eleven calves, set out across the desert from Marree to the goldfield, it arrived in July with the camels, carrying between 270 kilograms each, in good condition. Another fifty-eight camels for Coolgardie arrived by ship in Albany in September. By 1898 there were 300 members of the Muslim community in Coolgardie and 80 on average attended Friday prayer. Coolgardie held the main Muslim community in the colony at that time. There was not one Muslim woman amongst them, no marriages were performed and no burials, reflecting a young and transient population. Similar to the other structures, simple mud and tin-roofed mosques were constructed in the town. All of the Afghan Muslim population relocated from Coolgardie to Perth, the new capital of Western Australia. Racism was common towards the Afghan cameleers, there were reports of unsolved murders and torture of Afghan owned animals.
Great Eastern Highway runs through the town as Bayley Street. Just to the town's east, Highway 94 turns south onto Coolgardie-Esperance Highway, which heads towards Norseman, the starting point of the route east across the Nullarbor Plain; the narrow gauge railway to Kalgoorlie, the Eastern Goldfields Railway passed through Coolgardie, until 1968, when the new standard gauge line was built to the north on a new route. The Transwa Prospector train stops 14 km north of the town at Bonnie Vale. There is a limited public bus service to the town on the Kalgoorlie to Perth route, although school bus services are more frequent. In the 1890s there were four mining fields gazetted with Coolgardie as reference point: Coolgardie Gold Field East Coolgardie Gold Field. In 1902, this was the richest gold field in Western Australia. North Coolgardie Gold Field North East Coolgardie Gold Field Despite the changes to the Kalgoorlie region, Coolgardie still has a Mining Registrar. Varischetti mine rescue at nearby Bonnie Vale in 1907 Burbanks Gold Mine Coolgardie Gold Mine Coolgardie safe.
Shire of Coolgardie
