Adam Eckfeldt: he built the press, then ran it for fifty years

In the summer of 1792 the United States had a constitution, a president, and almost no coins of its own. It had no finished mint, either — just a half-built structure on Seventh Street in Philadelphia and a deadline. To make money the new nation needed machinery, and to build machinery it needed a mechanic. It found one a few blocks away.

Adam Eckfeldt was born in Philadelphia on June 15, 1769, the son of a tool-maker whose family had come from Nuremberg around 1764. His father ran a large smithy turning out edge-tools and implements, and Adam grew up apprenticed in it — learning ironwork and machinery, the exact trade a brand-new mint would soon be desperate for.

So when the Mint went looking for someone to build a screw press — the heavy, hand-cranked machine that stamps a design into a blank coin — Eckfeldt got the work. He built that first press in 1792 and supplied the Mint with balances and a lathe. At first he was a contractor, paid by the job rather than on staff.

He joined the payroll in 1795 and, on January 1, 1796, was appointed assistant coiner — a post Mint director Elias Boudinot made with President Washington's consent. He held it for eighteen years. Then, on the death of his predecessor in 1814, he became the Mint's second chief coiner, the official who turned approved designs into struck coins. He kept that job for twenty-five years. And here is the remarkable part: when he retired in 1839 he kept showing up and doing the work anyway, without pay, until just days before he died in 1852.

Eckfeldt was no flamboyant artist. The engineer George Escol Sellers, who knew him, called him "a cautious, careful, orderly and painstaking man… not one of the dashing, pushing, inventive mechanics" — yet a man under whose care "many apparently slight improvements were gradually adopted that in the aggregate amounted to a great deal." That is the signature of his whole career: a thousand small refinements that made coins come out cleaner and faster.

His hands were on the metal from the very start. Eckfeldt is believed to have made the die for the 1792 half disme — the tiny silver five-cent piece many call the first coin struck under federal authority. About 1,500 were struck on July 13, 1792, in the cellar of saw-maker John Harper at Sixth and Cherry Streets, because the Mint itself was still under construction. Thomas Jefferson deposited the silver to make them. (The word "believed" is doing real work: Eckfeldt was a part-time contractor that first year and was probably not even present at the striking, so the die attribution rests on Mint tradition and his own later accounts — handle it as likely, not proven.)

The 1792 disme — a full ten-cent pattern (a trial coin that never went into circulation) — is the firmer case. Scholars place Eckfeldt at the obverse (the heads side), pointing to its close kinship with the 1793 half cent he is known to have cut, and to a journal entry by a Mint visitor named Wailes who wrote that Eckfeldt "is an artist and has been In the Mint since its first establishment… he made the first dye [sic] used in it." The reverse is usually given to a member of the Birch family of engravers — though which Birch, and exactly who did what, the thin records of 1792 still leave open.

His role in America's first cents is clearer in outline. The one-cent Chain cents of 1793 were so crude that the public mocked them — and to a young republic the chain on the back looked uncomfortably like a symbol of bondage rather than union. The design was softened and the chain was swapped for a wreath. The artistic credit for that redesigned Flowing Hair Wreath cent generally goes to chief coiner Henry Voigt; what Eckfeldt indisputably did was cut the working dies that struck it and add the small sprig of leaves under Liberty's head. He engraved the first half-cent dies that same year, and had earlier cut the obverse die of the experimental 1792 Birch cent.

He was a fixer of process as much as a cutter of punches. He worked out how to harden a die evenly by spraying water across its hot face — a small trick that meaningfully lengthened how long a die survived. Late in his career he first resisted, then embraced, the sweeping mechanical changes Franklin Peale brought back from Europe's mints. Eckfeldt fretted that "if Mr. Peale had full swing he would turn everything upside down," and would rather adapt the Mint's old screw presses than scrap them. He lost: steam power came to the Philadelphia Mint in 1836. But he came around, and ended up an enthusiast for the very machines he had distrusted — and, tellingly, recommended Peale as his own successor.

His quietest act may be his most valuable. Foreign and old coins arrived at the Mint constantly as raw bullion, headed for the melting pot. Eckfeldt began pulling the interesting ones out and setting them aside — alongside specially made "master coins," struck with extra care on polished blanks. Sometimes he paid for the keepers out of his own pocket rather than watch them destroyed. Among the pieces that came in this way was a Brasher doubloon, the famous early gold coin of which only a handful survive today.

That growing hoard became the Mint Cabinet. The Mint Cabinet, in turn, became the Smithsonian's National Numismatic Collection — now one of the largest coin collections in the world, with hundreds of thousands of pieces. The man who built the machine that destroyed old coins also founded the institution that preserves them. His own daughter married William Ewing DuBois, who would serve as the first curator of that cabinet — keeping the collection, like the coining, in the family.