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Then, perhaps surprisingly, private industry took the next step. Instead of counterfeiting the government's coins, firms began producing their own. The ice broke in 1787, when "Copper King" Thomas Williams began producing his own coins and using them to pay his employees at the Parys Mine Company on the Welsh island of Anglesey. Employees welcomed these coins—which bore the likeness of a bearded Druid—"with open palms." Because the firm promised to redeem its tokens with legal tender in both London and Liverpool, they quickly began circulating throughout the country. The Mint "responded with a shrug." The Druids were not proper money, after all, and didn't infringe on its prerogatives; the masters of the Mint were initially "more than happy to let private industry supply its own small change … so that they could be left to enjoy their sinecures in peace." Meanwhile, Williams realized a tidy profit of about a quarter cent on each unredeemed coin. The scent of profits in the air attracted imitators and Selgin does much to describe the personalities and intriguing interactions of the leading competitors in this dynamic field.
The greatest attention goes to Matthew Boulton, who built a pioneering steam-powered mint at his famed Soho Manufactory near Birmingham. Boulton's initial quest for a royal coinage contract didn't pan out. After the fledgling American government spurned his coinage offers, he took on jobs for colonial governments and the East India Company before reluctantly entering the domestic token business. Desirous of a peaceful monopoly, he was thrust into a competitive free-for-all. In fact, his mint was a chronic money loser, burdened by high fixed costs, until it obtained a royal contract in 1797. Nimbler competitors flooded into the market during the 1790s. Selgin counts at least two hundred individual token issuers and about twenty coin makers, most of whom entered from the button-making industry. The issuers were almost all persons of good standing in the community—including grocers, drapers, silversmiths, and brewers—and had to be, since they promised to redeem their coins for legal tender. The monetary value of the coins they issued was fairly modest in comparison to their capital and access to credit.
Selgin (clearly a numismatic buff) is especially impressed by the high quality of the images struck on these coins, including brick-by-brick depictions of factories and ships rigged down to the last ratline. The Carmarthen halfpennies engraved by John Gregory Hancock and issued by ironmaster John Morgan show "painstaking interior scenes of men raking coals and working a tilt hammer." Selgin waxes poetic: "It is, of course, not possible to engrave heat. But someone forgot to tell Hancock." Businesses could earn a small profit by producing these coins and found them to be an excellent form of advertising. Because issuers promised to trade their coins for legal tender, quality had to be high or they would have had to foot the bill for counterfeits. The market spoke, as these new tokens—most of them half pennies—drove royal coppers from the field.
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