Uncle Sam’s brief experiment with metric coinage crested in 1879, when the U.S. Mint produced small numbers of gold pattern coins known as“stellas”because of the large star on their reverse (“stella” being the Latin word for “star”). The tryout ended the following year, but these $4 gold pieces are rare, popular and valuable, selling for strong six-figure prices.

Interesting things were also taking place in the world at large:

• Thomas Edison gave his first public demonstration of his incandescent lamp.
• Thirteen inches of snow buried New York City on Jan. 16 – a record that stood until 1996 as the city’s single biggest January snowfall.
• Madison Square Garden opened in New York at East 26th Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan.
• Frank W. Woolworth opened the nation’s first 5-and-10-cent store in Utica, New York. It quickly failed.
• French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi received a patent for his design for the Statue of Liberty. The statue would take its place in New York Harbor seven years later.
• Ferdinand de Lesseps formed the French Panama Canal Company, aiming to build a canal across narrow Panama to link the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific. De Lesseps had created the Suez Canal, but it took Teddy Roosevelt and American ingenuity to bring about the new canal in 1914.
• The artificial sweetener saccharin was discovered.
• An Ohio saloon-keeper patented the first cash register to combat stealing by bartenders at his Dayton watering hole.

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