The Ottawa branch of Britain’s Royal Mint was officially open for business.

In 1931 the heritage building on Sussex Drive, the surrounding land and the entire minting enterprise passed into Canadian hands, making the Mint a wholly Canadian institution.

Today the Royal Canadian Mint is a for-profit Crown Corporation with a mandate to deliver a fair return on investment to its sole shareholder, the Government of Canada.

Coins for the world
The Mint produces all of Canada’s circulation coins as well as coinage for other nations. For its domestic and international clients, the Royal Canadian Mint designs and manufactures collector coins; gold and silver bullion coins; customized medals, tokens and trade dollars; fine watches, jewellery and gifts. The Mint also provides refinery and assay services to customers around the world.

The Royal Australian Mint has struck coins for a number of South Pacific nations. Export coins were first struck in 1969 for New Zealand and, since then, coins have been produced for Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Western Samoa, Cook Islands, Fiji, Malaysia, Thailand, Nepal, Bangladesh, Israel and Tokelau.

The Mint also manufactures medals, medallions, seals and tokens for private and public sectors and sporting and tourism groups, both nationally and internationally. Examples of these are The Order of Australia, Third Pacific Conference Games Medallions, Sydney Monorail token and Conrad Jupiter’s Casino tokens.

The Royal Mint

The history of the Royal Mint itself stretches back over 1100 years. There is an unbroken link from the scattered workshops of the moneyers of Anglo-Saxon London to a single mint within the Tower of London, from a purpose-built premises at Tower Hill to the huge modern coining plant in South Wales.

In April 1975 the Mint was established as a Government Trading Fund, operationally very similar to a government-owned company. For many years over half its sales were shipped overseas and, in recognition, the Queen’s Award for Export Achievement was awarded on four separate occasions. In April 1990 the Royal Mint became an Executive Agency providing it with greater management freedom to develop its business further. Indeed the British Royal Mint has maintained its position as the world’s leading exporting Mint.

The minting of coins in Britain began in the first century BC, the earliest coins being crude imitations cast in moulds. This process gave way to striking coins using hand-held tools, the same technique by which coins would be struck for the next 1500 years. After the Roman Conquest the coinage of Iron Age Britain was brought to an end and thereafter large numbers of Roman coins circulated.

From the end of the third century AD some Roman coins were struck at a mint in London but for some 200 years after the Romans withdrew no coins appear to have been struck there. In 650AD, a London mint began operating, at first a little precariously but since the time of Alfred the Great (871-899) its history became continuous and increasingly important.

At the Royal Mint today, traditional skills are still used to create coins of the realm – skills that have been passed down from generation to generation.

The primary mission of the United States Mint is to produce an adequate volume of circulating coinage for the nation to conduct its trade and commerce. In recent history circulating coin production has varied between 11 billion and 20 billion coins annually.

The United States Mint operates six facilities across the United States with each facility performing unique functions. Current facilities are located in: Washington, DC; Philadelphia, PA; West Point, NY; Fort Knox, KY; Denver, CO; and San Francisco, CA.

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