page_title: Castaing machine
section_title: Invention
hierarchical_section_title: Castaing machine / Invention
caption_attribution_description: English: Double louis d'or aux huit L et insignes à l'effigie de Louis XIV, 1701. Le roi vieilli est néanmoins représenté avec toute la volonté d'un monarque énergique.
context_page_description: The Castaing machine is a device used to add lettering and decoration to the edge of a coin. Such lettering was necessitated by counterfeiting and edge clipping, which was a common problem resulting from the uneven and irregular hammered coinage. When Aubin Olivier introduced milled coinage to France, he also developed a method of marking the edges with lettering which would make it possible to detect if metal had been shaved from the edge. This method involved using a collar, into which the metal flowed from the pressure of the press. This technique was slower and more costly than later methods. France abandoned milled coinage in favour of hammering in 1585.
  England experimented briefly with milled coinage, but it wasn't until Peter Blondeau brought his method of minting coins there in the mid-seventeenth century that such coinage began in earnest in that country. Blondeau also invented a different method of marking the edge, which was, according to him, faster and less costly than the method pioneered by Olivier. Though Blondeau's exact method was secretive, numismatists have asserted that it likely resembled the later device invented by Jean Castaing.
context_section_description: Though production of hammered coinage ceased in France in 1645, edge lettering wasn't immediately reintroduced to that nation's milled coinage. At some point prior to 1679, Jean Castaing, a French engineer, invented a machine to apply edge lettering to coins, and in 1685, he approached the French government with a proposal to use his machine in that nation's mints. King Louis XIV favoured the invention, but his financial minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, believed that it would not be economically viable to pay the expenses required to put it into use. In 1686, over Colbert's objection, the French Council of State entered a contract with Castaing wherein all of the nation's gold and silver coinage would include edge lettering created by his machine.
  Two years later, in 1688, in response to counterfeiting and to raise money to support the Nine Years' War, Castaing proposed a method of reshaping and restriking existing coins, which was ultimately accepted. Castaing's edge lettering machine was used on the overstruck coins, and the Royal Mint supervisor Martin Masselin, the individual who undertook the process, was obligated to pay Castaing for its use. In 1691, Masselin was dismissed, as he and his clerks were found to have stolen from the Mint during the reformation of the coinage, and Castaing was appointed to perform the edge lettering and restriking in his place. A second reform took place in 1693. Castaing was imprisoned in 1700 on charges of using inaccurate scales to weigh the coins to be reminted; according to his wife, Marie Hippolyte Castaing (née Bosch), the allegations were false, originating from opponents who lost money as a result of his machine's introduction to the French Mint and the resulting monetary reforms.
  According to the engineer and numismatist George E. Ewing, Jr., Castaing's machine was likely similar to that used by Blondeau in England, but "Castaing's improvements made his machine worthy of being called an invention."
caption: A 1701 gold Louis d'or, overstruck using Castaing's method. An older 1690s date is visible on the reverse.
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