Walter Breen
From the day the mint began operations in 1792, copper was the bane of its existence, even as it had been for British and European mints for centuries before. Long expensive and difficult to come by in acceptable purity, usually requiring difficult refining when its chemistry was imperfectly understood, often available only in hard-to-work forms such as nails or machine parts, or more often still alloyed as brass, copper was a critical raw material both for cent planchets and forgears in the Philadelphia Mint's rolling mills. By the end of 1795, copper prices had risen high enough so that the mint lost 22% on its cent coinage; that is, 100 cents cost $1.22 to manufacture. As a result, on Dec. 27, 1795 George Washington verbally authorized Mint Director Boudinot to begin making lightweight cents at 168 grains apiece (instead of the former 208). This was a fairly daring step at the time, since copper was considered a precious metal when pure, and lightweight coins were likely to be rejected as worthless - less than seven years after the floods of lightweight copper coins in New York caused the value of even good heavy FUGIO and Connecticut and Jersey coppers to fall to about 'l4 their former rate.
The Mint people melted down older blanks, clippings, scrap copper, sheets and pigs, grains and lumps, and began making blanks at the new weight. As of Dec. 31 they struck 45,000 cents (Sheldon 76b) and in the next few weeks another couple of hundred thousands from the same dies. Washington signed a retroactive proclamation on Jan. 26, 1796 announcing the new weight standard, after which the new cents were distributed to banks.
In the meantime, mint efforts to obtain usable copper took stranger forms. Some 50,000 TALBOT, ALLUM & LEE tokens (altogether weighing 1,0761bs.) went directly to the Coiner's Department rather than to the melters. They were mostly rolled down to proper thickness, then cut into half-cent planchets, forming a slight majority of the common 1795 No Pole variety. Apparently a few were used as is for coining cents, for two specimens are known today which show their impress and British edge lettering: the gem Sheldon 75 in the Smithsonian (alluded to above under 1795), the other the unlisted 1795 variety discovered by this writer in 1969 and sold in one of Lester Merkin's auctions.
Elias Boudinot's major accomplishment during his Directorship, however, was negotiating a contract with Boulton & Watt (Birmingham, England) for copper cent planchets ready for press. Bypassing the rolling mills and cutting presses at the Mint was desirable if only to save wear and tear and time; but Boudinot also figuredthat it would save the country more than the cost of shipping the blanks from England, as well as guaranteeing quality higher than the Mint's own fairly primitive technology could then provide. Boulton & Watt (the most prestigious of the Birmingham coiners, Watt being the steam-engine inventor) was the third factory Boudinot had contracted with for the purpose, and by far the most successful; the others' product (though domestic) had been entirely unsatisfactory -more expensive and with a very high percentage of porous, cracked, rough or even split blanks. Eventually Boulton & Watt continued to have the majority of the Mint's orders, though in later decades Revere Copper & Brass and Crocker Bros. & Co. of Taunton, Mass., were to surpass the Boulton & Watt output. All this provided a precedent followed by the Mint to the present day: buying blank planchets for coinage from outside firms.
Once the problem of planchet supplies was solved, the Mint believed its troubles with minor coinage were over; but they had hardly begun. Banks and merchants seldom called for large cents in trade. Many refused them outright - which they were legally entitled to do, as large cents were never legal tender during their entire period of issue. (They achieved legal tender status, along with half cents, in April 1864; they are legal tender today.) Underweight foreign minor coins and tokens circulated freely while full weight large cents were hoarded. Objections to the tokens centered around their manifest lack of bullion value, unredeemability, etc.; objections to large cents mostly stressed their lack of legal tender status, their unwieldy size (even at the 168-grain standard), and their tendency to become filthy after relatively brief circulation, all of which objections were to become by 1856 arguments in favor of abolishing them in favor of the copper-nickel cents. Many company stores would accept large cents only at a discount; others priced the same items differently according to the kind of money used for payment -least for gold or silver, much higher prices in shinplasters, copper or "country pay" (barter goods). Redemption of accumulated cents. by banks could not be counted on, and even then was likely to be done not in silver or gold but in banknotes which might be acceptable at a discount or not at all. By the 1840's, copper prices were again rising enough to make the cost of making cents approach their face value. By 1851-53, the 1795 situation had come round again, so that the Mint lost a fraction of a cent on every cent it coined, while the large mintages satisfied nobody except the firms supplying blanks. Something had to change, and quickly.
At this juncture enter Joseph Wharton, with brighteyed schemes for Getting Rich Quick by selling the proceeds of his nickel mine monopoly to the United States Mint. Nickel had then almost no commercial use; it was a chemical curiosity almost as unfamiliar as platinum or selenium. As early as 1837, Dr. Lewis Feuchtwanger, an eccentric New York dentist, had proposed the use of "argentan" (a variety of German silver, consisting of unspecified proportions of copper, nickel, cobalt, iron, arsenic, zinc, tin and some other elements, often present only as trace impurities) for cents; his altruism in the matter may be gauged by his offering to supply the mint with unlimited quantities of the stuff. Mint authorities quickly ascertained that no two batches of argentan assayed the same, and used this fact as a conclusive argument against adoption of Feuchtwanger's proposal; but it was not forgotten, coming as it did at a time when privately made tokens circulated in quantity while the Mint's own products clogged bank vaults.
Late in 1853, when the Mint's losses on cent coinage had reached serious levels, Melter & Refiner James C. Booth - one of the foremost chemists of the day - proposed two modified versions of argentan, the lighter consisting of 40% nickel, 40% copper, 20% zinc, the darker 30% nickel, 60% copper, 10% zinc. Pattern cents, using a proof obverse of the 1853 quarter eagle, followed in both alloys, and later in a third experimental composition -40% nickel, 60% copper (very slightly affected by a magnet). All these were eventually rejected. The ternary alloys, when bright and new, were readily confused with silver; when dull or tarnished they more nearly resembled respectively tin and lead: an open invitation to counterfeiters to use tin and lead for making cents. The copper-nickel alloy was impossibly difficult to make into homogeneous ingots and strip, and blanks fabricated from it were hard enough to damage dies. Moreover, this alloy also resembled silver when bright and new. Nevertheless, these same alloys were tried again in 1854 on experimental cents with a Liberty seated obverse. Demonstration of the danger of adopting argentan (viz. confusion with silver) was made by coining a few 1854 half dime proofs from the regular Valentine 2 dies in argentan; they are slightly broader than normal and have a plain edge. (Judd 166, miscalled nickel.)