Annealing Copper Cents: Why a Heated Large Cent Takes a Crisp Counterstamp

The Copper in Your Purse

Take a big old large cent out of your purse, if Mr. Lincoln's tax man has not got it already. It is nearly the size of a half dollar, brown as tobacco spit, and all copper. Uncle Sam struck them from 1793 clean through 1857. Few folks know that in the early years the Philadelphia Mint could not get enough copper of its own. It bought ready-cut blanks, called planchets, from Matthew Boulton's Soho Mint in Birmingham, England, and had them shipped across the ocean in casks like salt pork. So plenty of a good Yankee penny was English copper pretending to be patriotic, which puts it in fine company with half the Concord legislature.

Later on Paul Revere himself, the man of the midnight ride, went into copper. Around 1801 he set up a rolling mill at Canton, Massachusetts. That mill rolled the copper sheathing for the bottom of Old Ironsides and the sheet for the dome of the State House in Boston, and in time the Mint bought his copper too. A man who rode all night to warn of the British spent his old age rolling metal flat. I take comfort in that. There is hope for every fool who started out loud.

Copper Has a Temper

The mints cared about all this because copper has a temper, the same as a wife or a mule. Hammer it, bend it, roll it, or strike it in a coining press and it goes stiff, springy and ornery. Smiths call this work-hardening. Copper gets stiffer the more you work it, which is the exact opposite of every married man in Merrimack County.

You can hear it happen. Tap a copper sheet and the first blows give a dull tunk. As you go on, the sound climbs to a ting like a church bell with a grudge. That bright ring is the metal telling you it has had enough. Keep beating it cold past that point and it will split on you like a rotten fence rail.

The cure is fire. Lay the copper in the coals until it shows a dull red. Judge the colour in a shadowed corner, never in sunlight, because daylight will lie to you about colour. Once it reaches that sullen red the stiffness goes out of it, and it comes out as soft as a church-supper dumpling. That is annealing. A fellow named Sorby in Sheffield, England, has lately been polishing and etching bits of metal and studying them under the microscope. He says metal has a grain inside it, as a board does. By his account hammering crowds and tangles the grain like a Fourth of July crowd at the Pittsfield tavern door, and the fire lets it settle down fresh. I cannot see that grain myself, but I have felt it in my forearms for thirty years.

Here is where blacksmiths make fools of themselves. Steel and copper are different animals. Quench red-hot steel and it comes out glass-hard. Quench red-hot copper and it comes out just as soft as if you had let it cool on the bench. The water does not harden copper one whisker. All it does is cool the metal quickly and crack off the black fire scale. I once watched a Barnstead smith dunk a copper pot over and over, trying to harden it like an axe bit. When he was done the pot was softer than his head, which I had not thought possible.

The Counterstamper's Trial at the Anvil

Now apply this to the cent. The coining press work-hardened its face when it was struck. Then it spent forty years jingling against buttons and nails and other cents. Lay one of those stiff old coins on the anvil, set my steel punch reading 'G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H.', give it a lick, and the letters come up shallow and mean. On a January morning, cold enough to freeze the spit in your beard, I have even had the punch chip at the corner.

My cure is simple. I put a handful of cents in an iron ladle and set it in the coals until they glow dull red. Then I tip them into the quench bucket, dry them, and stamp. The letters sink in as deep and clean as a fresh grave. A cold cent fights the punch the way a wisdom tooth fights the forceps. An annealed one gives way like a milk tooth on a string tied to a slammed door.

For twenty years folks told me copper turns brittle in the frost. I tested that on the anvil. First I took a cent that had sat on the windowsill all night, as cold as a widow's welcome, and struck it with a punch that had been warming by the forge. The letters came out clean. They were a little shallow, because it was a stiff old cent, but there were no cracks. Then I struck the same kind of coin with a punch that had lain frozen on the sill all night. There was a sharp tick, and the corner of my 'W' lay on the anvil like a lost tooth. The punch had chipped, not the coin. Copper stays tough in the cold. It is hard steel that turns glassy and brittle in deep frost, and that is why every blacksmith worth his apron warms his chisels and punches before he strikes in January. The old-timers saw something crack, blamed the copper, and never looked at the steel.

Mind what I mean by a 'warm' cent. I mean one that has been to dull red in the coals and cooled back down. Sitting it by the stove does nothing. It has to see the fire. Strike an annealed cent and you get a deep, satisfying thunk and letters as crisp as a new bill.

Mind the new money as well. In '57 Congress quit the big cent and gave us the little Flying Eagle, which is copper with one part in eight of nickel. It is hard enough to shoe a mule, and the mule would complain about the price. This very year, 1864, they went to bronze. Each of these alloys stamps differently. A counterstamper who does not know his metals is just a man hitting money with a hammer, and the government already has that covered.

The Morning Barnaby Took Up Metallurgy

It was January a few winters back, so cold the Suncook groaned under its ice like an old man getting out of a chair. I had a fat batch of cents glowing red in the ladle and my quench bucket set by the window. The week before I had kept molasses in that same bucket, and a bear never forgets molasses. Barnaby put his great black head through the window, smelled sweetness, and gave the bucket a swipe that would have taken the door off a bank. The water went across the hearth and the coals threw up a cloud of steam and ash so thick I could not see my own nose, and it is a considerable nose. I fumbled the ladle, and a dozen red-hot cents, a few already stamped, went skittering out the window into the snow, hissing like a nest of copper snakes.

Under that window crouched Deputy Asa Pettingill, lately of the county's employ. He had crept up to spy on my still-house and had his coattails hiked up for a better look through the chinks. One fresh-stamped cent dropped down the back of his trousers and settled exactly where a man sits. His howl was like a bagpipe being sat on by a Baptist choir. He danced and slapped and spun. Barnaby had never seen a deputy dance and took it for an invitation. He reared on his chain and one claw opened the seat of those county trousers like a letter: wool, drawers, and a strip of hide about the length of a carrot. Then he sniffed the rag, deeply disappointed that it was not molasses.

Pettingill ran for the turnpike with his hindquarter steaming in the frost and hollered all the way to the Barnstead line. I am told a doctor in Concord spent an hour picking wool and bear hair out of him with tweezers. But the cent had done its work. That deputy still carries my mark, 'G. G. WILKINS / PITTSFIELD N.H.', printed backwards the way a seal prints. It is the only honest signature ever to appear on county property. Ever since, my quench bucket has sat on the far side of the forge, and Barnaby gets his molasses in his own dish like a Christian.

What the Revenue Man Heard and Felt

Captain Donald Vance, formerly of the federal revenue service out of Manchester, sat by my forge and admitted that the temper of copper had caught men for him more than once. Near Bethlehem, in a fog so thick you could lean a shovel against it, he heard a high, thin note that held its pitch too steadily to be a lost loon. It was a cracked seam. He followed it better than a mile and found a young fellow beside a pot hammered up cold from sheet that had never once seen the fire. It had gone so hard and springy that it split along a rivet line in a crack as fine as a hair. 'That pot whistled Yankee Doodle better than the Bethlehem cornet band,' said the Captain, 'and it kept time better too.' He seized the pot, sent the boy to an old coppersmith in Littleton to learn annealing between courses, and promised to come back with a warrant and a tuning fork.

Over in Ossipee a coppersmith's widow had no forge, so she annealed her rivets in the bread oven and quenched them in the dishwater. One rivet rolled into the dough for the Congregational church supper, and the pastor split a back molar clean in two on the first slice. The Captain sent him to Pittsfield. I pulled that molar in three pieces for fifty cents and a blessing, and I am still waiting on the blessing.

Down in Plymouth a farmer swore his sugarhouse kettle was his grandmother's, untouched since 1790. Old copper that has been knocked about and scrubbed for seventy years grows a hard skin and rings under the knuckle. Copper fresh from the fire, worked and annealed, gives a dead, dull thud. The Captain rapped it twice and got a thud each time, like knocking on a pumpkin. 'The kettle said thud, the farmer said grandmother, and I said then grandmother is under arrest.' The farmer owned that he had had it reworked and the top fitted the week before.

Same Fire, Three Jobs

The rule is the same for still sheet, rivets and coin blanks. Work the copper and it stiffens. Heat it to dull red and it softens. Quench it or let it cool as you please, because copper does not care. Then clean off the scale.

When a coppersmith raises a pot, he beats a flat sheet over a stake course after course until it bellies up. When the metal rings sharp and springs back at the hammer, he anneals it and goes on. Do this and the walls come up even, with no hidden cracks waiting to open once the fire is lit. A rivet has to be soft so that it heads over under the peen and swells tight in the hole. A hard rivet's head splits like a hickory nut. Anneal rivets by the tinful, and do it in a forge, not a bread oven. The Mint annealed its planchets so the copper would flow into every corner of the die: Liberty's hair, the wreath, the date.

Annealed copper comes out dressed in black scale. The quench knocks most of it off. Pickle the rest away in a crock of oil of vitriol well cut with water, or in strong vinegar if you are poor or timid. When you mix vitriol, always pour the acid slowly into the water and never the water into the acid, or it will boil up and spit in your face. Rinse well afterward. Bright copper matters in a still because its bright face grabs the rotten-egg, cabbage-cart sulfur stink out of the vapour. Scale and green crust dull that face, and a dirty still does half its job.

As for the run itself: heat it gently. The foreshots come first and the heads right behind them. That is where most of the wood alcohol comes off, because it boils at about a hundred forty-eight degrees by the thermometer, well below good spirit at a hundred seventy-three. It does not all come off in one tidy spoonful, though. Some trails along into the heads, so throw away a generous measure of the early runnings. Nobody drinks them, rubs them on a gum, or sells them to a fool. Then come the hearts, which are the good part. Last come the tails, oily and flat, which are set aside. Remember that spirit vapour is heavier than air. It sinks and pools along the floor toward your firebox or lantern, and then the shed goes up like a cannon. Keep the receiving jar well away from open flame, keep your joints tight, and keep a bucket of water handy, out of the bear's reach. And remember that making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States.

Ashes and Oak in the Doubler

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, wrote to say that his uncle swears by hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Soak wood ash in water and what drips out is lye, potash, the stuff your grandmother made soap with, and it will burn your knuckles and blind your eye. In a hot keg it may knock back a sour, vinegary note, but it does nothing to the poison spirit. The wood alcohol comes through like a tax collector through a closed gate. Red oak's pores run open end to end. I have blown pipe smoke through a short stave at the Pittsfield tavern to win a dram. Its shavings add colour and a puckery tannin, and that bitterness hides the harsh heads. It covers the warning without removing it. The only cure for bad heads is the cut, made with a generous hand every time. Give your uncle my regards, Rabbit, and take away his ash bucket.

Remember what the copper teaches. Work a thing too hard and it turns brittle. Give it a little fire and a rest and it comes back soft and willing.