Testing Copper Cents by Their Ring: How to Tell an Honest Coin from a Counterfeit

Four Coins upon the Anvil

Drop a good copper cent upon the face of an anvil and it gives a warm, clear ring that dies away slowly. I would set that note against any church bell in Merrimack County. Every man who works copper ought to learn what that note means, and what it means when he does not hear it. To teach it I lay four coins upon my anvil here at Fort Wilkins, on the Suncook Valley Turnpike in Pittsfield, while the still ticks behind me and Barnaby, my black bear, sulks at the end of his chain.

The first is the old large cent. It is as big as a pocket watch and near enough pure copper, 168 grains of it. Our fathers carried these from the 1790s onward, and a man with a dollar's worth of them walked lopsided. Congress tired of minting a coin that cost nearly what it was worth, and in 1857 it killed the large cent and the half cent with it. There was no funeral and no hymn, only a piece of paper.

The second is the little Flying Eagle that took its place. It is no longer pure copper but about eighty-eight parts copper to twelve of nickel, cut to 72 grains. Folks call these nicks or white cents, for they come out as pale as a Portsmouth banker who has just seen the ledger. In '59 an Indian went upon the face, and the metal stayed the same. Copper-nickel is hard. It fought the coiners at the Philadelphia Mint and wore their dies so badly that half the cents came out mushy, with the feathers barely showing. It is the only thing in Washington that ever wore out a government man.

The third is the new bronze cent of 1864: ninety-five parts copper with five of tin and zinc, at 48 grains, a third the weight of Grandpa's big copper. A bronze two-cent piece came the same year. The fourth coin is a Civil War token. In '62, when every coin went into the mattresses, shopkeepers from Manchester to Milwaukee had copper tokens struck bearing their names, their trades and some patriotic slogan. Millions of them passed as cents, until in 1864 Congress outlawed private one- and two-cent pieces. A man who stamps his own name on coins reads such news very carefully. For the scholars I will add that Lewis Feuchtwanger, a New York druggist and metal man, struck cents of German silver in 1837 and begged Congress to coin the nation's change in a nickel alloy. They refused him, and twenty years later they did nearly what he had said.

Whence the Copper Comes

In my granddaddy's day a Pittsfield man got his copper from old ship sheathing, worn-out kettles and whatever the Boston scrap men would sell. Now it comes out of the Keweenaw country on Lake Superior. There copper lies in the ground as pure as a wedding ring, in lumps so large that men spend days cutting them up with chisels. Since the canal and locks at the Sault opened in '55, it comes down the lakes by boat and east by rail and water to the Revere mill at Canton, Massachusetts. Paul Revere opened the first copper rolling mill in this country there in 1801. He rolled the copper for the State House dome in Boston and sheathed the bottom of Old Ironsides. From Canton the sheet goes by rail to Concord and by wagon up the turnpike past Epsom, rattling like a tinker's funeral. When I hear it coming, I go out to meet it with my knuckles ready.

The Ring and the Thud

The principle is simple. A struck coin rings because the die has pressed the metal tight, grain against grain, so the whole piece shivers like a little bell. A cast counterfeit is another animal. The crook pours cheap lead or pewter into a sand or plaster mold, and the cast metal is full of pores and bubbles. Drop it and it does not sing. It goes tuck, like a toad landing on a church step. The large cent rings soft and mellow, because copper is a forgiving metal. The white cent rings higher and longer, with a little silver in its voice, for harder metal rings higher and holds its note longer. The bronze sits between them like a middle child.

Two summers back a peddler from Lowell paid for a jar of my best with a stack of cents. I rang them as soon as he turned his back and found seven bad ones in twenty. He ran when I called after him, cut across my yard, and stepped inside the circle of Barnaby's chain. The bear tore the wool clean off the seat of his britches and two inches of meat besides, and the fellow left red prints in the dust nearly to the Barnstead line. His purse fell, and Barnaby swallowed it whole. For six days I worked through the bear's leavings with a manure fork and recovered every honest cent, scoured brighter than the Mint ever sent them out. The lead ones never came back. I fed the bear greens and milk until I was sure he would come through.

I ring every cent before my punch strikes G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. into it. If I put my name on a lead coin, I have signed a lie. A cracked coin, even an honest copper one, will split under the punch, and a cracked cent rings dull too, so the anvil warns me before the hammer does. Once, when the sheriff's deputy emptied my coin box for evidence, I begged leave to ring the pile. Two coins thudded, and they were his own pocket change, tossed in to impress the magistrate.

Lessons from the Brushy Mountains

Junior Vance, a retired runner from Wilkes County, North Carolina, knows the same test. A Charlotte buyer once paid him with a shining silver dollar, and it went thunk on a feed-store counter. The old man behind the counter never looked up: "Son, that ain't a dollar, that's a sinker." It was lead with a silver wash, and Junior nailed it over his door. His granny flicked every fruit jar with her fingernail before filling it. A sound jar said ting, and one with a hairline crack said tunk and went out the back door. The one jar Junior failed to flick split on a washboard road and emptied itself into his lap. A revenue man who rapped smokehouse walls for a hollow passed right by his cousin's cache, which was packed tight with feed sacks and thudded like a stump. Then the man pried open an honest wall that rang hollow and found it full of yellow jackets.

His Uncle Doyle ran his still by ear. The thumper starts slow and deep, then quickens and rises like a heartbeat after a long run. Silence was what Doyle feared, for it means the fire is out or something is plugged and pressure is building: "a still that's quiet is a still that's fixin' to kill you." A plugged still is a bomb with a copper hat on. Never walk away from one while it is running.

Giving Copper Sheet a Hearing

Before I pay for any sheet, I hang it by one corner from a cord so nothing touches it but air. Then I rap it near the middle with a knuckle, or better with a small wooden mallet. Sound sheet sings all over, and the note shimmers and dies slow and even. A buzz like a hornet in a stovepipe, with a quick dead stop, means a lamination: dross or a gas bubble pressed flat during rolling, splitting the sheet into two hidden layers. Hammer a seam in such stuff or heat it a hundred times and it opens, and vapor escapes. Vapor is fire waiting for a spark. A crack cuts the ring short in the same way. I rap every sheet at the top, middle and bottom. A merchant who forbids it is a horse trader who will not let you look in the horse's mouth.

Physicians knock for the same reason. Auenbrugger of Vienna, an innkeeper's son, watched his father tap wine casks to judge how full they were, and in 1761 he published a book on tapping the chest. As a dentist I tap teeth, and a tooth gone bad at the root is tender to the knock. At the stake anvil, as I raise a dome, you can hear the note climb with every blow while the copper work-hardens. When the ring turns tinny, stop. Bring the copper to a dull cherry red in the forge and it goes soft as butter again, whether you quench it or let it cool. Steel behaves the opposite way, and many a blacksmith has ruined his first still by treating copper like a horseshoe. Remember too that copper takes out the sulfur stink in the vapor. Copper in the helmet, the vapor pipe and the worm does most of that work, so do not skimp on the parts the steam touches.

A Run of Cider Brandy, as History

Our grandfathers in Epsom and Chichester ground and pressed their apples and set the cider in cool cellar barrels with the bungs loose, and the wild yeast made it dry and sharp. They drew it off the lees, because boiled sludge scorches. They filled the pot no more than three quarters full, sealed the joints with flour paste and never with anything holding lead, and kept a gentle fire. A quick first run gave low wines, and a slow second run was the one where they made the cuts. Pectin makes apples breed more methanol than corn or rye, and methanol blinds and kills. Throw away the foreshots generously. Then come the heads, smelling of glue pot and varnish, and they go to waste as well. The clean, fruity hearts are kept. When the jars turn oily and smell of wet dog, the tails have come and the run is stopped. Number your small jars and judge each one. Alcohol vapor creeps along the floor toward the flame, so keep the jars away from the firebox and a bucket of sand by the door. Mark well that making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. This is set down as history and education.

Ashes, Red Oak and the Bitten Coin

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg will clean out bad heads. The ashes are potash. New England was built on that trade, and the nation's first patent, in 1790, went to Samuel Hopkins for making potash and pearl ash. But potash is a lye. It may soften a sour wash's vinegar bite, yet it does not touch methanol, and in a thump keg it is only mud. Red oak is open-pored and weeps spirit through its staves, which is why tight whiskey barrels are white oak, whose pores plug themselves. Red oak shavings add color, tannin and pucker, so a harsh spirit merely tastes different and wears a red coat. The only thing that cleans out bad heads is throwing them away.

Lastly, do not bite your coins. Lead is softer than gold and takes a fine tooth mark, and a hard copper-nickel cent will crack a molar clean down the middle. I have pulled more teeth cracked by coin-biting than by Barnaby. Drop the coin and listen, or weigh it on a good scale, for an honest coin weighs what the Mint says it should. Your ears cost nothing, and they do not crack. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.