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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Conder101, post: 4325590, member: 66&quot;]How many times have people come on the forums claiming to have an aluminum cent and saying &quot;it FEELS much lighter than a regular cent and it doesn&#039;t sound the same when dropped.&quot; But when we finally get them to actually weigh the coin it ends up weighing 3.1 grams and is just a plated cent.&nbsp; It happens a LOT.&nbsp; I don&#039;t think she was trying to mislead you, but people tend to &quot;see&quot; and &quot;feel&quot; what they expect to.&nbsp; Ssame thing happens a lot with people who think they have a &quot;silver&quot; cent.&nbsp; Many say it is clearly heavier, until they actually weigh it.&nbsp; You can&#039;t trust your senses.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Yes 1.5 million pieces were made as a test run to make sure the equipment could process them.&nbsp; It is believed all of those were destroyed.&nbsp; The existent 74 aluminum cents came from a different source.&nbsp; When the Mint was testifying before the Congressional committee on coinage on the aluminum cent proposal, examples were passed out among the committee members.&nbsp; After the hearings were adjourned it was discovered that 10 or 12 pieces had not been returned.&nbsp; One of these turned up a few years later when the Congressman left office and one of his aides found the coin in the Representatives desk while cleaning it out.&nbsp; Rather than turn it over to the Mint for destruction, he sent it to the Smithsonian.&nbsp; That was how they got their specimen, the mint did not send them one.</p><p><br /></p><p>A second piece, the Toven specimen, has this for its story.&nbsp; Supposedly one of the Capital police observed a Representative pull something out of his pocket and what appeared to be a dime fell out.&nbsp; The officer picked it up and tried to return it to the Congressman who told him to just keep it.&nbsp; Later the officer discovered it was a 1974 aluminum cent.&nbsp; They kept it for many years and eventually the family submitted it to ICG for authentication and slabbing.&nbsp; It was slabbed as an AU-58.&nbsp; About a year later it was resubmitted, this time to PCGS and was slabbed as MS-62.&nbsp; The piece is still held by the Toven family and even though the government says it is their property and illegal to own, they have made no attempt to recover the Toven coin.</p><p><br /></p><p>Those are the only two KNOWN specimens.&nbsp; There may be others still being held by Congressmen or their families.&nbsp; Or they may just be lost.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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