Coinstar rejects them.
They’re steel coins. The reason is that copper was needed for bullet cases and other uses during the war, while steel, though also needed, was in somewhat more plentiful supply relative to demand, so cents were struck in steel.
They’re made of steel, right? So the weight/magnetism are all wrong.
From Wikipedia
Edit: At least I put a link in there.
During WWII, copper was a desperatey needed metal, used both for electrical wiring and ammunition casings. At a point where extended mining had not yet caught up with demand, the Treasury switched from using copper to steel to coin the penny. Because steel has a diiferent weight than copper, machines designed to test the weight of a coin to accept it find that the penny has the “wrong” weight.
The steel pennies do have a slight collectors value, especially by the roll.
But watch out for scams. There were a handful of copper pennies minted in 1943 and they’re worth a lot of money. Some conmen have taken steel 1943 pennies and copper-plated them to fool buyers.
Easily checked with a magnet. A bit harder is a modified 1948 penny.
Copper was so scarce that when the Manhattan project needed some fourteen thousand tons of metal to make the windings for the Calutrons (Cyclotrons for the refining of U-235 by Mass Spectrometry), they used Silver borrowed from the Treasury and accounted for by the ounce.
Any idea of the number of these out there? I was always told that there were no 1943 copper pennies, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were.
Also, when did they go back to copper? at the beginning of the 1944 printing cycle, or are there some steelies for '44?
Copper pennies from 1943 are so rare that anyone offering you one is probably offering a forgery, knowingly or not. http://www.usmint.gov/about_the_mint/fun_facts/index.cfm?flash=yes&action=fun_facts2a The estimate is that only 40 were made, and all are accounted for.
Why didn’t they just melt down some 1942 pennies?
I love this story. The snooty reply from the Treasury was “Silver is never measured in tons; our unit is the Troy ounce”
So they asked for and recieved 395,000,000 Troy ounces of silver
Someone who knows for sure will probably come along, but my WAG is: Silver makes great wire (better than copper), but lousy shell casings. Any pennies that got melted down went into making brass for ammo.
Last time I checked, a brilliant uncirculated (BU, or MS-65) 1943 penny was worth about $6.00. I have one here somewhere that I found in a roll of worthless wheat pennies.
When I was a kid, we carefully scanned every penny we came across looking for a 1943 copper one. Ah, the dream!
Try to find a 1913 V nickel instead, there are only 5 of them.
OK, but that quality is hard to find. How much for a Good?
The fourth paragraph here talks about going back to copper, using spent shell casings as part of the mix. Also, reading a little further, apparently there are a few steel 1944 cents. I hadn’t known that before.
We probably buy a thousand steel cents every week in our coin shop. Average condition we pay 5-10 cents each, sell for 20 cents.
Since they were first discovered, there have been about 40 pieces of the 1943 copper cents turn up in varying condition. No one knows how many were made as they were made accidently.
For the 1944 steel cents, I believe there have only been less than five found. All made by accident with left over steel planchets.