Benjamin Franklin

Most of the people whose work appears on American coins were sculptors and engravers by trade. Benjamin Franklin was neither. He was a printer — and, by the time he turned his mind to American money, arguably the most famous private citizen in the world.

He was born in Boston in 1706, the fifteenth of his father's seventeen children and the youngest of the sons. At twelve he was apprenticed to his older brother's print shop, and printing became the craft that opened every other door. By his early twenties he was running the Pennsylvania Gazette in Philadelphia. From 1732 he wrote Poor Richard's Almanack under the pen name "Richard Saunders," filling it with the thrifty proverbs that became his trademark — "a penny saved is two pence clear." (He polished that line and made it famous; he didn't invent it. And the version everyone quotes, "a penny saved is a penny earned," he never wrote at all.)

Printing pulled Franklin into the world of money early, and this is the thread that matters for collectors. Colonial governments needed paper currency, and currency needed a printer who could make it hard to fake. Franklin became that printer. Working with the Philadelphia botanist Joseph Breintnall, he developed a now-famous trick: he made plaster molds of real leaves, cast printing plates from them, and let the unrepeatable veins of an actual leaf — too fine and too random for any engraver to copy by hand — guard the bill against forgery. Long before there was a United States, Franklin was already in the business of deciding what money should look like.

The rest of his life reads like a syllabus. He showed that lightning was electricity. He founded a library, a fire company, a hospital, and the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania. He is the only Founding Father to sign all four documents that built the country — the Declaration of Independence, the 1778 alliance with France, the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War, and the Constitution. He died in Philadelphia in 1790, at eighty-four. The coin he is remembered for in numismatics had been struck just two years before.

Franklin's signature on a coin isn't a way of carving metal. It's a way of thinking — a habit of compressing a moral lesson into a picture and a few sharp words, the same instinct that drove his almanac.

During the Revolution, the Continental Congress put Franklin in charge of designing its paper money. In February 1776 he produced a set of small-denomination notes, and on them he placed a device that would outlive him: a sun shining on a sundial, the Latin word FUGIO ("I fly"), and beneath it the plain English instruction MIND YOUR BUSINESS. Read together it is a rebus — a picture-puzzle — that means time flies, so mind your business. In Franklin's century "mind your business" meant tend to your work and your affairs, the briskest possible sermon on industry, not the modern brush-off it sounds like today.

The same year, a striking version of those motifs appeared in metal: the so-called 1776 Continental Currency dollar. One face carried the sundial and motto; the other carried a second great idea — thirteen rings, each a colony, locked into an unbroken chain around the words WE ARE ONE and AMERICAN CONGRESS. One man's argument for union, reduced to a picture a farmer could read in a second.

A word of honesty here, because the Continental dollar's story has changed. For generations it was treated as America's first dollar coin, a 1776 pattern designed by Franklin. But in 2018 the numismatists Erik Goldstein and David McCarthy published "The Myth of the Continental Dollar," marshalling contemporary evidence — a London handbill advertising the pieces as sixpenny "American Medals," a skeptical 1790 letter from Paul Revere, and the absence of any order from Congress — to argue the pieces were souvenir medals struck in Europe several years after 1776. The debate is live and unresolved; you'll now see the date written "1776 (1783)." What is not in doubt is the source of the imagery: the sundial-and-rings design language is Franklin's, carried straight over from his Continental currency. He authored the meaning, whatever shop later struck the metal.

On April 21, 1787, the Congress of the Confederation — the government running the country before the Constitution took hold — authorized an official copper coin. A resolution in early July spelled out the design, and it was Franklin's, lifted almost line for line from his 1776 currency: the sun and sundial, FUGIO, MIND YOUR BUSINESS, and on the reverse the thirteen linked rings around WE ARE ONE and UNITED STATES. Collectors call it the Fugio cent — also the "Franklin cent" or the "Mind Your Business cent." It is regarded as the first coin officially issued by the United States.

As with the paper money, Franklin supplied the idea, not the chisel. The contract was given to a private operator, James Jarvis, who held a stake in a Connecticut minting operation; the dies are generally credited to the New Haven engraver Abel Buell. That division of labor was pure Franklin — the thinker who supplied the meaning, the craftsman who cut the steel.

Then the project ran straight into a swindle. Jarvis won the federal contract by paying a $10,000 bribe to William Duer, head of the Board of Treasury, and the government authorized him to take possession of a vast quantity of public copper. Jarvis then did the unthinkable: instead of striking the federal Fugio cents he had promised, he diverted much of the copper into lighter-weight Connecticut state coppers, which were more profitable, and he fell hopelessly behind schedule. When the reckoning came he had fled to Europe. Congress canceled the contract for failure to deliver, and the judgment it later won against him was never paid.

So the first coin of the United States was also the subject of its first coinage scandal. The numbers tell the story of a contract that collapsed: only 398,577 Fugio cents were ever delivered to the Treasury, on May 21, 1788 — a fraction of the hundreds of tons of coinage the deal had called for. The Founders' tidy little coin about minding your business was very nearly sunk by a contractor who didn't mind his.

What survives is genuinely scarce — and a remarkable number of the best examples trace to a single lucky cache. In 1788 the Bank of New York stashed several thousand uncirculated Fugio cents in a keg. It was rediscovered in 1926; the American Numismatic Society examined the 1,641 coins still in it in 1948, and the bank kept hundreds for itself. Franklin would have appreciated the irony: thousands of his "mind your business" coins, forgotten for over a century in a banker's vault.