Alexander Graham Bell £2 (2022)

No Alexander Graham Bell £2 was struck for circulation, so every coin started life as a brilliant uncirculated or proof coin from The Royal Mint. The packaging tells the story of Bell's life and work, and a coin still sealed in it beats one that has been taken out. The raised buttons stand proud of the field and pick up knocks and rub marks first, which lowers the value of a loose coin. Toning and fingerprints on the flat ground between the buttons also count against it.

The Alexander Graham Bell £2 was not issued for circulation, so it has no rarity rank.

The Alexander Graham Bell £2 looks like a telephone keypad: twelve round buttons in a grid, crossing from the centre onto the outer ring. Buttons 1 to 9 carry letters and the star and hash keys carry dates. The name runs down both sides of the ring, ALEXANDER on the left and GRAHAM BELL on the right. It carries Jody Clark's portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, and since it never circulated, any example will come from a pack or set.

Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish inventor who grew up around the study of speech: his father taught elocution, and both his mother and his wife were deaf. His work on the harmonic telegraph, a device meant to carry several messages at once along a single wire, led him to the telephone, and he achieved the first successful transmission of a voice by telephone. He went on to invent other devices, including a metal detector, but his name stays tied to the telephone. For the centenary of his death in 2022, the artist Henry Gray designed this Innovation in Science coin for The Royal Mint. The reverse is a telephone keypad of twelve round buttons in four rows of three, spanning both metals. The buttons carry letters, and read in order from 1 to 9 they spell PIONEER OF THE TELEPHONE. The star key holds the year of his birth, the hash key 1922, the year he died, and the remaining key is 0. ALEXANDER runs down the left of the outer ring and GRAHAM BELL down the right, and the edge reads INNOVATION IN SCIENCE • BELL.

In the Innovation in Science set it followed the Discovery of Insulin 50p of 2021 and was issued in 2022 together with the Alan Turing 50p.