1 Dollar '1880 Goloid Metric Dollar' Pattern, Goloid

The goloid metric dollar was the obsessive project of Dr. William Wheeler Hubbell, who patented the goloid alloy in 1878 and spent years lobbying Congress to adopt it as the basis for American coinage. His pitch was arithmetically elegant: by embedding a precise quantity of gold into a silver-copper alloy, the coin's face value would correspond exactly to its metallic content, eliminating the chronic problem of coins being melted when bullion prices shifted. Congress was unpersuaded. The Mint struck patterns across several years — 1878, 1879, and 1880 — to keep the proposal technically alive.

Judd-1654 is among the later survivors of a dead-end experiment that never cleared committee.