Welcome to the first post of the Coins Daily blog. Each day a new coin will be featured. Today's coin, the 1943 Steel Penny, is fascinating and unusual.
In 1943, the US Government started making
pennies out of steel. But why? Well, the country was in the middle of WWII and there was a concern there would be a copper shortage. Brass shell casings for the soldiers' bullets use a lot of copper. So the natural decision was to use a different metal for the most common of US coins. The following year, the shortage was over, and pennies switched back to copper (well bronze actually).
So that explains the steel part, but what about the "Ghost 4" ? If you look at the pictures, you can see that the 4 in 1943 is almost completely missing. There is only a shadow of a 4 there. This defect is introduced by an
error in the minting process, when grease gets into the die for the coin. The grease fills in numbers, letters, or even whole words! Whatever is filled in shows up weaker or almost missing on the coin. In this case, that was the 4 in 1943. So one faulty die stamped out coin after coin with missing or weak 4's.
Out of a bank bag of 2500 steel pennies, I found about 15 good examples of a ghost 4 penny. I also found a few examples that have a ghost "S" as well for the mintmark.
So that about wraps up the first post for the blog, please let me know if you have any more info or picutres about these historical and wonderful coins.
In 1943, the US Government started making
pennies out of steel. But why? Well, the country was in the middle of WWII and there was a concern there would be a copper shortage. Brass shell casings for the soldiers' bullets use a lot of copper. So the natural decision was to use a different metal for the most common of US coins. The following year, the shortage was over, and pennies switched back to copper (well bronze actually).So that explains the steel part, but what about the "Ghost 4" ? If you look at the pictures, you can see that the 4 in 1943 is almost completely missing. There is only a shadow of a 4 there. This defect is introduced by an
error in the minting process, when grease gets into the die for the coin. The grease fills in numbers, letters, or even whole words! Whatever is filled in shows up weaker or almost missing on the coin. In this case, that was the 4 in 1943. So one faulty die stamped out coin after coin with missing or weak 4's.Out of a bank bag of 2500 steel pennies, I found about 15 good examples of a ghost 4 penny. I also found a few examples that have a ghost "S" as well for the mintmark.
So that about wraps up the first post for the blog, please let me know if you have any more info or picutres about these historical and wonderful coins.
