Metal Detecting In The Good Old Days

Having been in the hobby, as it were, for so long, I have noticed changes in the language of treasure hunting. That's right...treasure hunting! A lot like the totally threatening public announcement on TV these days, "Buzzed Driving IS Drunk Driving!" I'd have to also add "Metal Detecting IS Treasure Hunting!" make no mistake about that. Let me do my "old man" voice at this point; "Back in MY day, we were called THer's not Detectorists, because the detector was simply a tool, like a shovel, a compass or a map...something that helped us get closer to a recovery. When we dug a target, I don't recall anyone saying, "Hey, Shovelist...dig a little to the left there!" or someone calling out "Where do we go next, Compasssist...sst..ss...? " well, you get the picture. Machines in the 1960's, 70's and 80's utilized what we called "analog" circuits, which for our discussion, we'll just label "no computerization," which made for a simple, yet hardy, piece of gear. The detectors were mostly made of metal, filled internally with tangled wires and large components. And the biggest joy, a seriously non-ergonomic handle. I think the oddly-bent grip was actually designed by chiropractors looking for work.

My coveted 1982 hip-mounted Garrett Deepseeker with the 8" dinner-plate search coil

You might be able to last a few hours swinging, before heading in to the hospital for wrist surgery. Additionally, the concentric search coils were not-terribly-user-friendly, especially without the see-thru design of today, but more like a thick dinner platter sans the turkey. You had to develop your "pinpoint stare," also called the "target glare" whereas you'd stare at your magic-marker-ed "X" (you had to make the X yourself) on top of the dinner-platter-coil when you got the signal centered, and remember to keep glaring at the exact spot as you swung the coil away. Theoretically, this was where you'd find the target. This is also where a good coin-probe would come in, and you'd have to make that yourself too, grinding the living daylights out of the end of an old ice-pick, carefully rounding off the tip. A lot of people used a Craftsman screwdriver to probe for and pop targets out of the ground. The problem here was the beautiful scratch the sharp-edge of the screwdriver's blade made across a recently-flawless Standing Liberty. After just one such an incident, you'd find many a THer rounding off the edge of an ice-pick in a dimly lighted garage. I knew guys who could detect a target, then slide the probe into the ground and pop the coin out, without leaving so much as a mark in the grass!

Don't use a screwdriver as a coin probe...nuff' said

Another technical shortfall back then, which is business-as-usual today, was that the clever, infinitely useful slim little pulse-induction pin-pointer had not been developed yet. Consider the fact that the electronics needed to drive your basic metal detector in the 60's and 70's required the same amount of space usually found in a standard shoe box, so a hand-held metal detector the size of a large cigar was right up there with a working hand phaser from Star Trek. So we tromped indelicately with all our squarish and bulky metal detecting machines across parks, open schoolyards (back when they were not the barb-wired enclosed prison yards of today) and private land. Beach and SHALLOW water detecting was okay as long as you placed a plastic bag over the control box (then, as now, search coils were somewhat waterproof) and limited your depth of water to knee deep.

People ask me if silver coins were found in quantity back then, and when I tell them of all the silver we did recover, they sigh and say they wish they had started in the hobby at that time. I explain that there was a lot of lost silver literally laying around then, but the technology to recover it was not as advanced as it is now, so we recovered coins slower and in direct proportion to the ability of the machines of that time, so deeper layers of lost coinage are becoming available to the advanced technology today that we could not touch back then.Welcome to the future!