Katie Thornton

Eventually, they figured out how to get her whole body on there.

But even so, the coin designs from year to year were pretty bland.

Until finally, in 1904.

President Theodore Roosevelt said, hey, our coinage is ugly.

Luckily, at some point during Teddy's tantrum, he made a specific demand.

The U.S.

Mint, he urged, should import a near-miraculous new device that had recently been invented in France.

It was called the Janvier Reduction Machine.

The Janvier machine allowed the mint to mass-produce coins with a level of detail that would have been impossible before.

Suddenly, Lady Liberty could do more things.

It even led to an explosion in special commemorative coin designs in the 1930s for things like the Texas Centennial and the opening of the Bay Bridge, to the point that the whole thing actually got kind of out of hand.

Remember, up until this point, silver coins were still made of silver.

They had that inherent metal value.

But in the 1960s, that ended.

President Lyndon Johnson got rid of all of our pretty, shiny silver coins and replaced them with something called clad coins.

Jesse Kraft says that prior to this, if a national government ever debased its currency, they would only dare to do it very gradually, changing the coin's metal content a little at a time over the course of decades.

And it's true.

No one really cared.

Everyone just carried on as if we were all still lugging these little pieces of silver around and continued spending and accepting U.S.

coins like nothing had changed.