WHY DO COINS HAVE RIDGES?

The stylish rims you might have noticed on U.S. dimes, quarters, half dollars and some dollar coins are called reeded edges. They've been on American currency almost since day one as a way of keeping people honest.

Reeded edges served a two-fold security purpose for silver coins. One, they added an additional, intricate element to the coins that made them more difficult to counterfeit. Two, they prevented fraud.

For as long as coins have been made from precious metal, a fairly common way to make a quick, ill-gotten buck was coin clipping. Clippers would shave off a tiny amount of metal all the way around the rims of a bunch of coins, collect the shavings, then sell them. Working carefully, a coin clipper could trim enough off of coins to make a nice profit, but not so much as to make them noticeably lighter or smaller. A clipper could then still go out and spend his devalued coins as if they were unaltered. Reeded edges ruined this scheme, since a shaved edge would be immediately obvious and alert anyone who received one that something was wrong.

Why don't nickels and pennies have reeded edges? Nickels and pennies are mainly composed of inexpensive metals, so the chances that they would be tampered with are low.

Before their adoption by the U.S. Mint, reeded edges were also used in the UK. When the physicist Isaac Newton became warden of the Royal Mint in 1696, he used reeded edges, among other means, to combat clippers and counterfeiters. Other European coins from as far back as the early 1500s also feature reeded edges.

To read the complete article, see:
Why Do Coins Have Ridges? (https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/28044/how-many-ridges-are-quarter-and-why-are-they-there-first-place)

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