I zoomed my iPhone as far as it goes, sorry for the pixelated image. I’ll take a better one if needed. Have the experts seen this before? Nothing comes up in Google. 1943 Steel One Cent:
If if doesn't say UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, then it was made in China Please show us a picture of the Obverse side.
Very curious, we'll definitely need an obverse photo. Do you mind sharing where you found this piece?
Absolutely, I’ll snap it Sunday cause I’m out of town for two days. If I remember correctly, there’s nothing wrong with the front. It looks like a normal steel cent.
It's hard to imagine how grease or anything could completely fill the letters that are missing and everything else be so sharp. It's also hard to imagine why even the Chinese would fake this. Have you weighed it? Perhaps it's some kind of novelty item. Looking forward to the pic of the obverse.
I have not weighed the penny but I will and post a pic. I have no idea if it’s real, it was in a bank bag with hundreds of steal pennies I inherited. The last time the bag was opened was by father, he noted a few with possible double die errors but my phone and loop cannot see them. He dated the note 11/14/82 and says the total weight of pennies is 3.77 lbs, so however many that comes out to is what’s in the bag.
I came across a 1960’s penny (can’t remember the exact date) but it’s completely missing the word ‘liberty’. There is no sign of it anywhere and I looked at it from every angle in all kinds of light. The rest of the penny looks normal to me.
There is an occurrence in the minting of coins where the recesses in the die get filled with grease and words...or portions of words disappear.
Yeah, if you look closely you can still see the outline of IN, Happens the same way with Loss of lamination coins, in the void you can see the details of the die face. This type of error can't happen at the mint. The coin was meant to fool an unsuspected buyer. Depending on what the Obv looks like, I would be a buyer of the oddity.
The correct numismatic terminology would be Doubled Die, not double die. And Doubled Die fall under the Variety category not the error category. There is a difference.. Variety A variety is a coin that differs from its basic design type in some distinctive way and is thus differentiated by collectors. Mint Error A result of human or mechanical error during manufacturing. Planchet, Die or Strike. However, some coins are the product of multiple errors. Variety vs. Mint Error | NGC
I didn't say it couldn't or didn't happen, only that it's hard to imagine. It happens frequently on smaller blocks of text, but that is a lot of text missing.
3.77 pounds of cents should be about 500 coins, give or take unless they are dated after 1982 which I doubt they are.
I see one diagnostic that I think may give a clue as to what happened here: I know, I know, pareidolia - but that looks an awful lot like a ghostly V.D.B. Not something that could conceivably appear on an actual steel cent, no matter what else happened to it. But exactly the sort of thing that would creep into an image generated by an AI model that was trained on a bunch of not-carefully-sorted Lincoln cent images. Until you can post multiple clear images of a coin from different angles and perhaps with different lighting, I'm going to have trouble tamping down my suspicion here. Sorry.
