How Much is a Dime Bottle?
Several years ago I discovered by accident that a dime would just fit through the opening in a wine bottle, though I confess I can’t remember exactly why I even thought to try it. That begged the question, “How many dimes does it take to fill a wine bottle?” So every day as I was removing loose change from my pocket I’d toss any dimes I’d received into an empty wine bottle on my desk.
Recently, after what I’d guess must have been six or eight years, the bottle got full. My son and I sat down and counted its contents and discovered there were exactly 1500 dimes inside. That’s $150.00 worth of accumulated pocket change, which I’ve now rolled up so I can take them to the bank.
A dime weighs just over 2 grams, so the bottle contained abound 6 pounds 10 ounces of dimes.
Most of the dimes were the copper/nickel clad composition adopted in 1965 but we found three old silver dimes, the kind I remember from my childhood and which I collected for a while. Silver goes for about $18.50 an ounce today so each of those old dimes has about $1.30 worth of silver in it. (You can see why the US Mint wanted to take silver out of all our coins…) I’m keeping the silver dimes, by the way, though more for their novelty and sentimental reasons than their metal value.
Footnote: For the curious the wine bottle is a 2001 Kaikoura Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, which a close family friend brought back to us as a gift from a trip to New Zealand.
