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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Conder101, post: 990768, member: 66&quot;]Numbers is close but not quite there.&nbsp; The term has probably been tied to the US Cent since the cent first appeared in 1793.&nbsp; In the post colonial era each state had it&#039;s own monitary system and although they varied considerably from each other they all used the Spanish milled dollar as their base.&nbsp; The fractional units often used the same names, but were of widely different values.&nbsp; The only one of these fractional unit that was close in value to the US Cent was the New York Penny which was set at 90 pennies to the dollar.&nbsp; Now New york was the financial center of the new country so citizen of all the states were intimately familiar with the New York Money of Account.&nbsp; (In most cases the monetary system of each state was a theoretical &quot;Money of Account&quot; that the books would be kept in and into which other states monies of account would be converted back and forth for determining payments, but except for some paper currencies they had no physical existance.)&nbsp; For all practical purposes 1 NY penny = 1 US cent</p><p><br /></p><p>Although people often say the cent was called a penny because of the British denomination, they was no such coin as a British penny at the time.&nbsp; The FIRST British copper penny would not come into existance until 1797, fourteen years after the end of the Revolutionary War, and four years after the US Cent started production.&nbsp; There had been a Briish penny but it was a silver coin about the size of a dime and it had not been produced for almost a hundred years.&nbsp; So no one alive ha ever seen one used in commerce.&nbsp; There was a copper half penny which was roughly the same value as the cent, but they hadn&#039;t been made for twenty years either (except for counterfeits).&nbsp; And you wouldn&#039;t really say a cent was a penny because it was worth a half penny would you?&nbsp; (And it was close, but the US Cent was actually closer in value to the New York Penny than to the British half penny.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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