Comment by rad_gruchalski

7 days ago

Most likely because lead was used for faking coins. Lead covered in a thin layer of gold. You know that coin biting move from movies about middle ages? It was to check if you’re dealing with gold or lead. So lead was the impersonation of the fake. Turning a fake into the real deal.

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rad_gruchalski

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Antipode  7 days ago

I thought the coin bite was just to check that it left an indentation. How would you use it to differentiate gold from lead? They're both soft.

  • bee_rider  7 days ago

    I found a little discussion on the topic:

    https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8810/is-biting-...

    They found a paper which apparently (I didn’t dig into their sources) says:

    > concludes that the coin biting is most probably a cliche in literature and movies.

    > The manuscript points out that there are many references to coin biting form early 20th century but not from older (contemporary to the setting) sources e.g. […] They put a possible origin to the cliche to 19th century gold prospectors distinguishing pyrite from gold nuggets by biting.

    So, it may have been 19’th century authors speculating about to-them long past history, based on current events.

    The relative softness of different widely circulated alloys bounces around quite a bit over the ages, but the author only has to come up with something that is plausible to their audience, after all. Biting a coin is sort of trope of an expert at adventure, right? In some sense it is plausible enough that there’s some difference the property of widely circulated alloys, so whatever that difference is, the expert knows how it feels. Maybe the common fakes of the era are softer lead, maybe they are some harder silver alloy, but the expert pirate knows.

    • rad_gruchalski  7 days ago

      But my original write up makes fora good story ;)

      Apparently alchemists thought of gold to be a noble pure metal while lead was thought to be an immature version of gold that could be purified into the noble version of gold.

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