There rarest coin in the worldor certainly one of them, is the Double Eagle gold dollarwhich is coined in the USA From 1907 to 1933 And a coin had, at the time, the value of $ 20. Of the approximately 450,000 specimens produced, today about a dozen have survived and perhaps even someone more, but many of them have been lost and are probably in the hands of private collectors. To date, we know with certainty that 2 are kept at Smithsonian Institutionand another was auctioned in 2021 to almost 19 million dollars.
What is the Double Eagle gold coin and how it was born: the story
The “double eagle” is a gold coin from 20 dollars coined by Mint of the United States From 1907 to 1933. The name derives from its double value compared to the $ 10 coin, called “eagle”. The history of Double Eagle dollar he began in 1904, when the then American president Theodore Roosevelt decides to renew and embellish US coinsand in charge the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to design the design a new dollar with the aim of renewing the “double eagle” drawing-with decorum and eagle on the front and on the back-produced since the middle of the previous century. Saint-Gaudens accepts the assignment, but the realization of the coin undergoes significant delays due to the poor health of the sculptor, who died in fact in 1907. From that year until 1933 they will be produced Several specimens of Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle: right in early March of ’33, four years after the 1929 crisis, they are coined 25,000 new “double eagle” coins.
A few days later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt – at the beginning of the maneuvers for the New Deal, the set of actions that want to raise the US from the Great Depression – orders before paying any price for gold anymore, then to bring together all the gold already coined in the coffers of the Federal Reserve. What happens, therefore, at “double eagle” coins? Pieces are produced until May of the same year, but at the end of December ’33 the Treasury Secretary withdraws all the gold in circulation, paying back with paper money. The withdrawn coins they come then meltedand it seems that only two specimens of the Double Eaglethen donated by the State Mint to the Smithsonian Institution to flow into the Collection of national coins.
What we know about the last surviving coins with the double eagle
In the following years, given the gold retreat operations, the very delicate moment in which America paid, the severe maneuvers made by the president and the war that kicked off, theLast coinage of 1933 is considered exceptional. It seems that in the early 1940s circulated between 8 and 10 coins At “Double Eagle” coined in 1933, but they were probably also more. Among these, there is a trace of Two coins purchased In those years by the Texan merchant B. Max Mehl, but then in 1944 possessing a “double eagle” privately declared illegal from the mint itself. THE secret services They therefore use themselves to look for the last specimens remained in circulation to seize them: during these operations, it seems one of being obtained none other than from FaroukThe king of Egypt.
It is, in fact, of theLast Double Eagle coin of which there is certain news, while certainly circulating others. Of the coin in the hands of the king you lose track Until the 90swhen he returns to America and is immediately intercepted and seized by the authorities, and then gets to the heart of a legal dispute.
What is the value of the Double Eagle 1933: auction beaten for almost 19 million dollars
To whom, in fact, one belongs to Gold currency outside the Usa coinagepurchased by a now deceased Egyptian sovereign, which therefore also presents a regular export license? We then get to auction and, in 2002 it was sold by Sotheby’s for 7.590.020 Dollarthe. The $ 20 additional dollars were paid to “regularize” the value of the coin, paying them to the federal government.
It seems that the same coin was then Resented in 2021 almost 19 million dollars. The fate of the dollars are different with the double eagle preceding 1933 or not gold, less rare and less precious, which have circulated – and still circulate – with high values but not from dizzying.
