Katie Thornton

They upped the zinc and lowered the copper, which again worked at first, but not for long.

So when Philip Diehl became the director of the U.S.

Mint in 1994, one of his main goals was to stop and ideally reverse this decline.

Unfortunately, Philip did not have the necessary sway to kill the penny.

America would have to wait for someone else to make that one happen.

At that time, in the mid-90s, every quarter, thanks to its high face value, was still netting the Mint about 22 cents in seniorage.

And every year, some of those quarters would fall out of circulation.

People lost them, accidentally threw them out, or put them in coin jars in the car.

Which meant every year, the banks had to ask the Mint for more quarters to replace all those missing coins, make up the gap, and ensure that the country didn't run out of change.

Only, the Mint couldn't just rely on hardcore collectors, like the ones I met at the convention, to get the job done.

The idea was to take billions of dollars worth of quarters out of circulation.

If it was ever going to do that, the Mint would somehow have to convince ordinary people, people who rarely even thought about quarters, to start collecting them too.

The idea had been circling among coin fans for years.

Canada's mint had already done something similar, and it made money.

But Philip couldn't just order the mint to make a bunch of new designs.

After all, the mint, by this point, had been stamping quarters with the same design of George Washington in profile since 1932.

Making lots of new designs required lots more resources.

To make the state quarters program happen, the Mint needed an advocate in Washington.

So Philip went to a congressman from Delaware named Mike Castle and laid out his idea.

Philip told him there was no way they could do all these coins in one year.