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Message:: [QUOTE="cladking, post: 1929811, member: 68"]Thanks.  Very interesting.  The numbers are important and tell a story but I'm not certain just what story they are telling.  There are a few major confounding factors here.  Chief among them is that these copper cents have a far higher survival rate than the zinc coins that followed them. The 28 years of zinc penny production almost swamp the mintages of these and their survival rate is far lower.  If this weren't confounding enough pennies have a very low velocity and tend to sit in cans a lot.  Finally, a large number of copper pennies have been removed from curculation since 2008 because of their metallic value.  Copper has stayed fairly steady at around 20% of circulation issues (wheaties about .5%) with all these factors working against them.  Zincs corrode away as fast as they are made to replace the coppers being hoarded as pennies get used less and less in commerce.  I believe that if production weren't trailing off so fast and zincs weren't so ephemeral then the "expected" percentage of the early memorials would be substantially lower and a  higher attrition rate implied.  ie- only about 10% of cents would be copper.  The way pennies are used changed quite a bit starting in 1974 when they acquired a negative real value. Any computations on a "coin" with a high negative value made of metal worth more than its face value has got to be a toughie.[/QUOTE]