Today's U.S. Mint facilities include the Washington, D.C. headquarters and Mints at Philadelphia, Denver, San Francisco and West Point, New York. The machinery the Mint uses to make coins has changed greatly since it began in 1792.

The first Philadelphia Mint used harnessed horses to drive the machines that produced our coins. The coin making process took hard work and lots of time. It took minutes to produce a single cent.

Today's Philadelphia and Denver Mints use modernized machines to perform a version of the same work done in 1792 and can produce more than 75 million coins in 24 hours. The modern Philadelphia and Denver facilities together in recent years have produced as many as 20.5 billion coins in a single year

. At the beginning of this section you learned that Technology is defined as "any invention, including tools, machines, materials, and sources of power (energy) that makes people's work easier." Now that you have taken a virtual tour of the changes in coin making throughout time, would you agree that technology has made work easier for coin makers?

Take a few minutes now to visit The Minting Process Revealed from the United States Mint's website for an animated tour of how coins are made today. You might also enjoy the animated storybook Making Sense of Cents--The Birth of a Coin starring "Goldie the Mint Fish" and "G.W. Quarter"!