For more than 1500 years, from the Iron Age to the reign of Charles II in the seventeenth century coins were struck by hand. The first English moneyers, operating in towns across the kingdom, laboured in what were little more than blacksmith shops, hammering blanks between a pair of dies.
Today, the Royal Mint boasts some of the most advanced coining machinery in the world. In the Melting, Rolling and Blanking Unit is housed one of the most up-to-date foundries in the world. Strips of metal are drawn from large electric furnaces, reduced to the required thickness in a tandem rolling mill and transferred to large blanking presses where coin blanks can be punched out at the rate of 10,000 per minute. The blanks are softened and cleaned in the Annealing and Pickling Plant before the final process in the Coining Press Room. Here the blanks are fed into coining presses where the obverse and reverse designs, as well as the milling on the edge, are stamped onto the blank simultaneously.
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The Royal Mint's latest presses can each strike more than 700 coins per minute, making it impossible for the human eye to separate the individual pieces as they pass through the press.
Standards of accuracy are imposed by law. To ensure that the composition of the alloy is correct, samples of the molten metal are routinely checked by x-ray fluorescence spectrometry. Each year samples of coins struck for both United Kingdom and New Zealand are presented to the Trial of the Pyx where they undergo rigorous quality examination by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths'.
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