The new commemorative silver coin to mark the Queen's Jubilee on 2 June 2003 is now out.

The design and specifications of the coin require the Queen's personal approval.

The £5 coin bears the words '2003 Coronation Jubilee - Five Pounds - God Save the Queen' on one side and 'R.D. Elizabeth II Dei Gratia Regina' on the other.

But of most significance for this bulletin board, she ordered that the coins should weigh precisely one ounce, thus preserving that historic British link between weights and coinage

If Tony had done a little more research, he would have noticed that "crown-sized coins" have had the same size since 1816! (I do not have the weights of crowns struck between 1662 and 1816 to hand, but they wre a similar size). In that year, the crown-sized coin was a 5/- piece. The Charles & Dianna Wedding crown, (1981) was nominally a 25p coin (ie the same face value). The crown that was struck to commemorate the Queen Mother's 90th birthday (1990) was however a £5 coin, *but was the same size as the 5/- coin of earlier years*.

I deduce therefore that Her Majesty was not endorsing either metric or imperial weights but rather that she was continuing a tradition that had been going for a very long time.

It might be worth looking at the weights of a few coins that are in common sirculations:

£2 - 12g
£1 - 9.5g
50p - 8g
20p - 5g
10p - 6.5g

Also €1 - 7.5g

THese all look like metric weights to me.

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THese all look like metric weights to me.
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Me too.

But you could use conversion factors and convert them to imperial units, and then they would look like imperial weights.

You will notice that all these weights are multiples of 0.5g.

Take the weight of the UK £1 coin - 9.50g. Its Imperial equivalent is 0.3351 oz. It does not take a rocket scientist to work out that the designers of this coins were using metric rather than Imperial units. The same applies ot all the other coins mentioned.

I've not heard this spin on currency by the pro-metrics before! Still it makes a better read than the old stale L.S.D. debate.

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Take the weight of the UK £1 coin - 9.50g. Its Imperial equivalent is 0.3351 oz. It does not take a rocket scientist to work out that the designers of this coins were using metric rather than Imperial units. The same applies ot all the other coins mentioned.

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Maybe it was originally .33 oz and they converted it to metric and rounded it off?

Bud, that is a stupid comment. Coins are made to very high specifications, otherwise the vending industry would collapse.

If you noticed that all the other weights I quoted were also round values to the nearest 0.5g, you would realise that the same applied to the £1 coin.

If you look at British metrication history, you will realise that most of commerce and industry was metricated in the 1970's. By 1979 many consumer item swere also metricated. Then, in 1980 Mrs Thatcher disbanded the Metrication Board and froze the metrication process. That means that metrication that was already in place stayed, but, apart form petrol, there was no further metrication until after Mrs Thatcher resigned.

The £1 coin was introduced in about 1984 - metrication was well established in industry by that time.

I think Bud meant that the metric figure was rounded off, not the physical item which could have been a third of an ounce.

I have double-checked my source

http://www.24carat.co.uk/specificationsofcommoncoins.html

- every one of the figures that I quoted has a "0" that I did not include. I thereefore discount Bud's rounding argument.

All I was trying to say was that when you see a measurement that looks like it's a rounded-off number, you can't assume that it was originally in whatever units it's in. It may have been converted and then rounded. In this case, I agree that this is not likely, but in general I wouldn't jump to conclusions, especially when reading values that are quoted for common people (as in newspapers).