Collection Highlights -
I decided to continue down the path of highlighting my international or universal silver trade units. This was a very common theme in the '70s in the 80s and there were many different private mints running these types of rounds. Today I'm going to highlight the 1973 "The international universal trade unit" I had a hard time finding any details on who minted this or how many many were made. This round is listed on both Numista and agroundworld, but interestingly little information. I believe that this round was made for many years and runs all the way into the mid 80s. About the only information I could find was that "Pure silver" is written in French, German, English, Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese.
Outside of that very little information was available from what I could find. Hopefully some other stacker out there has more details for me.
numista
agroundworld.com
Obverse
The obverse is made of the two halves of the globe. With the year stamped in the bottom of 1973, and the world trade banner underneath both gloves. As mentioned before. Silver is listed in multiple language to give you that international trade unit feel and the design is otherwise very non-nationalistic. There's no design or draw feature outside of a bit more English that would make this round be favored towards one country versus another. I like this design and I particularly like the multiple languages around the rim. It pulls into the fact that silver in one country is silver in another country, and the underlying value is the same across all borders.
Reverse
Taking a look at the reverse we get a lot of similarities to the previous trade unit rounds that feature some sort of scale and the measuring of what looks to be silver rounds versus the weight to measure their value. Outside of the scale it says the international universal trade unit, one trillion ounce and then breaks it down to 31.1 g, or 480 grains. That should cover just about any method of precious metal measurement that we want. I also kind of like the rated edge along the rim of the coin to add a little bit of character.
Overall I like this round design. I do think the reverse is actually my favorite side of this round because it's pretty clean and really pops out. I think I also took a better photo of the reverse. Something about the way the globes are made that makes it look a little too busy or crowded or clustered on the up first for my liking. Hopefully someone out there can get some more details on who meant it these things since there seems to be quite a number of them out there.