How the Philadelphia Mint Makes a Cent, and How to Spot Off-Center and Clipped Coins

Friends, I have handled more American cents than any banker in Concord. I handled them with a hammer, and a hammer teaches a man more than a ledger ever will. Here at Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike I have punched G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. into a great many of the nation's pennies. A man cannot rightly judge a mistake until he knows how the thing should be made. So come to the bench, and let us look at the cent the way a natural philosopher looks at his worm and his receiver. It is copper and heat and force, and every coin is the record of an experiment. A word first to the prudent: the law of the United States forbids making drinking spirits without a federal permit. Take what follows as history and instruction for the curious.

From Fat Slab to Little Bird

When I was younger and handsomer, which is to say before the bear and before the sheriff, the cent was a great fat slab of copper, near as broad as a half dollar. The Mint struck those large cents from 1793 straight through to 1857, and from 1795 onward each weighed one hundred sixty-eight grains. You could knock a squirrel off a limb with one.

Then came the Coinage Act of February 21, 1857, which killed the large cent and the half cent in one stroke. In their place came the little Flying Eagle cent, eighty-eight parts copper to twelve parts nickel, weighing seventy-two grains. That is less than half the old metal for the same penny, which is the same arithmetic the Concord tavern uses on its rum. That May the people of Philadelphia lined up outside the Mint like hogs at a trough, handing in old Spanish silver and worn-out big coppers for the shiny new birds. I am told several pockets were picked, and a deacon sold his own hat for three eagles and walked home bareheaded in the rain, grinning.

Two years later Mr. James B. Longacre, Chief Engraver of the Mint, put an Indian princess where the eagle had been. But that copper-nickel alloy is as hard as a Calvinist's heart. It wore out the dies, and many a coin came out weak, with mushy feathers and a half-drowned date. Mr. Joseph Wharton, who owns a nickel mine in Pennsylvania, loves nickel loudly and in public. Even so, by the Act of April 22, 1864, Congress went to bronze, a softer and browner metal, and dropped the cent to forty-eight grains. That same year Congress forbade private men to issue one-cent and two-cent coins or tokens, which was aimed at the swarm of copper store cards the merchants struck in '63, when nobody could find a real penny for love or whiskey. Very well. I have never made a cent. I only improve the ones they make.

Strip, Scissel and Steam

In its early days the Mint could not roll decent copper of its own, and for years it bought ready-made blanks from Matthew Boulton's Soho works in Birmingham, England. Think of it: a nation that whipped King George twice, buying its pennies from his blacksmiths. Today the Mint melts its metal, casts it into bars, and runs the bars through rolling mills again and again until it has a long ribbon exactly the thickness of a cent. Rolling hardens copper, so the strip is heated to a dull red to soften it. Copper is forgiving here. Unlike steel, it softens whether you quench it in water or let it cool on the bench. Every coppersmith at his still-pot uses that same truth.

The cutting press drives a round punch through the strip, bang after bang, and each blow drops a blank called a planchet. What remains of the strip looks like lace and is called scissel, and it goes back to the furnace or out as scrap. The blanks are annealed, cleaned bright, and passed through the upsetting mill, which squeezes the edge into a little rim. Then they go to the press. Since 1836 Philadelphia has struck on steam. A pair of hardened dies inside a steel collar comes down with the force of a dozen angry oxen, and the metal flows like cold molasses into every line the engraver cut. Thousands a day, every one perfect. Except, of course, when it is not.

The Clipper of Barnstead

A clipper is the lowest crook in creation, lower than a man who waters cider. He shaves a hair from the edge of a silver coin, then another, until his coins look honest and weigh like liars. Two autumns back a fellow from Barnstead way, whom I shall call Ansel Pike because his mother still goes to meeting, paid me for a jug in half dimes as shiny as a bride. They were too light, and they had a file burr you could catch a thumbnail on. When I said so, he snatched the jug and ran, straight into the one patch of mud where Barnaby, my black bear, holds full sovereignty at the end of forty feet of chain.

Bears do not roar. Barnaby simply stood up, all seven feet of him, took Ansel by the seat of the trousers, and came away with a mouthful of Barnstead wool and a piece of hindquarter the size of a pork chop. Out of the torn breeches rattled every clipped half dime the man owned. I laid him on my anvil bench, poured a cup of tails over the wound, and closed it with twelve stitches of waxed harness thread. He then had the gall to ask whether I would take clipped coin for the stitching. I kept the half dimes and Barnaby kept the pork chop. Weight never lies, and neither does a bear.

Moon-Bit Rivets and the Liar's Cent

Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, who hammers the pots, swan necks and doublers at our foundry, knows punches as well as any minter. At fourteen he was set to punching rivet blanks from sheet. He got lazy and walked the sheet too short, so every blow caught the edge of the hole before it. A whole bucket of rivets came out with a crescent bitten from the side, exactly as the Mint makes a clipped planchet. His master hung one on the boy's watch chain until he learned to count. He wears it still.

Two falls ago at the Concord fair, Silas held a so-called rare error that a man in a checked vest was offering at a dollar. A true clip has a clean edge, and its rim fades away near the cut, because the upsetting mill never had a full circle to push against. This one had a rim that ran up and stopped dead, and file marks fine as a comb across the cut. The man took one honest penny for it rather than face the deputy eating pie behind him. The coin is nailed to Silas's shop door as the Liar's Cent.

Copper at the Still

A cent and a still share an enemy, and that enemy is impurity. A planchet with dirt or gas in it peels when struck. That flaw is called a lamination, and it lifts like birch bark. A pot of dirty copper cracks along the bad streak or pits through in later years. In Silas's words: "You cannot hammer honesty into bad metal. It has to be in the melt." Every hammer blow hardens copper, and its ring climbs higher. When it sings, heat it to a dull red and it goes soft as a summer apple. A man who does not anneal will split his pot at the shoulder.

Why does an old cent go brown, then black? Sulfur bites the copper and leaves a dark skin. The same chemistry serves us in the still. Fermenting yeast throws off rotten-egg stinks, and copper takes that sulfur onto itself, but only where the hot vapour touches it: the helmet, the swan neck, and the vapour line. Starved, cold or overheated yeast sulks and makes more of the gas, so feed and warm your mash properly.

For history's sake, here is the hill method for a corn mash. Take eight or ten pounds of cracked corn to about five gallons of clean water. Hold it near a boil, stirring, for an hour or more, until it thickens like porridge. Cool it to about one hundred fifty degrees, stir in a pound or two of crushed malted barley, and hold it warm an hour while it goes thin and sweet. Cool it to about eighty degrees before you pitch the yeast, then let it work most of a week. Run it under a low, patient fire. The foreshots are poison and go in the dirt. The sharp heads are set aside for cleaning, never for drinking. The hearts are the reward, and the oily tails are kept to run again. Collect in many small numbered jars, and judge each by nose and tongue. Never leave a still unwatched with heat under it, and keep sand or a wet blanket within reach. Never melt coin for patches, either. You do not know what metal you are pouring.

Ashes, Oak and the Collector's Eye

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, writes that an uncle swears by "hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads." Hickory ash makes lye, which is the makings of soap, and it will make the keg foam like a mad dog. Red oak is full of open pores, which is why coopers use white oak. Its shavings lend colour, and colour is not cleanliness. Heads come off every run no matter what sits in the thumper. The only cure is the jar you throw away. Do not trust the tavern rhyme about the blue flame, either. Methanol burns so pale you can hardly see it, and lead may burn any colour it pleases.

Lastly, the collector's eye, for this country has caught coin fever, and in 1858 a club in New York set up as the American Numismatic Society. My mark goes into a coin, with metal shouldered up around each letter. The Mint's die cracks come out of it as raised lines. Turn the coin over: my anvil flattens the back, while a true Mint error shows its trouble on both faces in agreement. An off-center strike is shifted the same way front and back, with a blank crescent on each side. A brockage shows its own design sunk backward. A double strike shows two sets of letters, and a worn die leaves mushy feathers and a ghostly date. If the Mint struck every coin true, half the collectors in New York would need a respectable vice. God bless the Mint's mistakes, and mine.