Henry Voight: Early American Coin Designer

The dies to create the shown coin have been attributed to the Mint’s first chief coiner, Henry Voight. These are the first coins produced for circulation by the United States Mint in Philadelphia. Henry Voight was appointed First Chief Coiner of the U.S. Mint in January 1793. I was surprised to learn he was quite an inventor. He and John Fitch had a patent on an early steamboat – all this prior to Robert Fulton. It was John Fitch who successfully navigated the first vessel ever moved by steam on the Delaware River at Philadelphia, on July 20, 1786. The following year, on August 22, 1787, a steamboat forty-five feet long again navigated at Philadelphia, in the presence of the delegates to form a Constitution of the United States, and again by John Fitch, with the assistance of Henry Voight. In 1792, Voight had sought the Mint position to aid his finances while he worked on a steamboat with John Fitch. According to the 1857 book by Thompson Westcott, The Life of John Fitch THE Inventor of the Steamboat: