1943 Steel Cents - What Happened to the Copper? - WWII Fact

My mother was a coil winder for electronics devices and worked for Consolidated Aircraft Co. in San Diego in the 40s. She always said that copper was never wasted, and productivity was essential for the war effort.

 

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Bullets. For war!!

From the hobby center and think tank of MTS.LLC

 

when quickly looking up info on my 1944 D pocket change penny I came across this information about the return to copper pennies.

http://www.coinvalues.com/wheat-pennies/1944

 

Britain made large copper pennies during World War II.

 

Here's some WW2 Ammne of ours one of there's.The top one is a 8MM and the bottom is a 30/06

 

Hmmmmmmmmm...

 

Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland also made large copper pennies during that period.

Millions of them, each three times the weight of an American copper cent.

Now we know where the copper REALLY went!

 

Removing the bronze from cents was more about a noticeable change because of the war - an propagandist example of sacrifice. Not many Americans know, Canada didn't sacrifice the bronze cent, but did sacrifice the nickel five cent coin in 1942 and 1943 - the replacement was a mixture of bronze called "tombac" that made it a cent coloured coin. It was very unpopular and the RCM replaced it with a 12 sided chrome plated steel coin in 1943. The chrome plated steel coins were actually minted into the early 1950s because of the Korean war.

I still find the plated five cent coins in roll searches. I have only ever found one tombac coin from 1942 in circulation.

 

With a rough calculation they saved about 3,000 tons of copper.

Current mine production is around a million tons per year, so that does not sound like a huge amount of copper to save.

 

The point is, if the military really needed the copper that bad the mint would still have been cranking out steel cents into 1945.

 

Thanks for the information. I also grabbed a sample of the u.s. coinbook.

 

Great information. Thank You!

 

I saw that myself and used the article in my U.S. History class!

 

By 1943, the Allies were very confident they were going to win against Hitler and Mussolini. And after the Battles of Guadalcanal and Midway, they were also very confident they would defeat the Japanese as the Japs would continue to retreat (plus they were developing the atom bomb as an option to not have to invade Japan). Thus, the need for copper was a bit overstated and we actually would have been fine if the steel cents were never made. One concern for the government was that they would be minting copper cents that would possibly be worth more than 1 cent in metallic value and the public would be melting them en masse for scrap value. They knew early on they wouldn't need to keep making the steelies.

 

https://coinweek.com/dealers-companies/gainesville/rare-us-coins-glass-cent-pattern-discovered/

 

In May of 2017 I found two 1943 steel cents in the local Coinstar machine, one Philadelphia mint and one San Francisco.

 

In 1943 the U. S. mint was also striking copper coins for many foreign countries, Belgian Congo, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Fiji, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, and Surinam.

 

Interesting article on coin composition and other fun stuff:
https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/education/resources/highschool/chemmatters/articlesbytopic/metals and nonmetals/chemmatters-april2007-coins.pdf

 

A question (yeah I know Google is my friend, and I have looked, but it dances all over the place), why was the composition set at 5% tin and zinc rather than just zinc?

 

Just gonna make a few statements, not reasons...

Tin allowyed with copper makes the copper harder. So does zinc, but not as hard (but close enoguh?). Tin is more expensive than zinc now (maybe it wasn't back in the 1800's?).

Maybe it resisted verdigris more effectively than zinc?