Next a visit to the Philadelphia mint which makes most of the coinage in America. Denver also makes some but the lion’s share comes from Philly. The first coins were made by hand and it took the mint 3 years to produce the first million coins. That would take 30 minutes today. Pretty fast. No wonder I couldn’t see what was going on. The tour is self-guided and you walk by windows that look down on the production floor. Every now and then I’d see a shiny glint pass by and know it was some coins. At one point they gave us a video in slo-mo and I could see what was happening. Otherwise it was a blur. Here are huge rolls of metal (if unrolled - 5 football fields long) waiting to be made into coins in even larger machines. If a coin falls on the floor - does an employee get to keep it to use at the casino? Is it given to the closest tourist? Does rain fall up? Absolutely not. It is recycled.
We also toured the Ben Franklin home - though it is not an original but build to his specs. And, speaking of specs: here’s a copy of what he did to make bi-focals - put one type of lens in the top and another in the bottom. In 1727, he also was one of the founding members of the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first subscription library where you could borrow books.
He also started one of the first fire brigades in Philadelphia. No fire hydrants at the time and the volunteers would stand in line with their own buckets filling the tank of the fire engine.
Petty clever man and the museum had lots of information about him. But the presentation was geared more towards school-age.
As we walked around, we saw a lot of murals on the buildings of the city. It was a program started to try to cut down on the graffiti in the city. Rather than negatively deface a building, how about positively improving it with art?
‘If a book about failures doesn’t sell, is it a success?’
Jerry Seinfeld
No comments:
Post a Comment