Katie Thornton

They were called eagles.

That's literally the name of the coin.

Silver dollars and gold eagles.

An eagle was worth $10.

This is Caroline Turco.

She is a curator at the American Numismatic Association.

I ran into her at the coin show in Savannah, where she showed me these old gold coins.

But beyond just standardizing the denominations, the early U.S.

Mint faced another equally important numismatic task.

It had to decide what our coins would look like.

All these counterfeiting countermeasures required that the first U.S.

coins all looked pretty much the same.

And thanks to our first president, they didn't even have any real faces on them.

Engravers in the 19th century had to carve designs by hand into a tiny steel stamp called a die using even tinier little chisel tools.

They didn't have electric lights, so they were doing this outside or in a window or straining their eyes in candlelight.

Then they'd have to either put some metal under the die and hammer the image onto the coin to be or stamp the design onto the coin with a press powered by human muscle or horses or eventually steam.

Not easy.

Initially, it was mostly her head.

Her head in profile with flowing hair.

Later, her hair was tied up with a ribbon.