We aren’t here to praise the penny, but rather, to bury it. The penny, and its counterparts, have been vanishing all around the world as the cost of minting one far outweighs its value. But hackers had already lost a big asset: real copper pennies, and now even the cheaply made ones are doomed to extinction.
If you check your pockets and find a pre-1982 penny, it’s almost all copper. Well, 95% of its slightly-more-than-3-gram heft is pure copper. Since then, the copper penny’s been a fraud, weighing 2.5 g and containing only a 2.5% copper plate over a zinc core. During WWII, they did make some oddball steel pennies, but that was just a temporary measure.
Penny Science
If you are a certain age, you might remember building a “voltaic pile.” These primitive batteries use pennies, cardboard soaked in vinegar, and aluminum foil. Granted, it wasn’t very practical, so raiding your couch for change to make a battery was never really practical, but it was a fun science experiment. There are dozens of YouTube videos showing this popular experiment, including the [ScienceBuddies] video below.
Old pennies were also a cheap and easy source of copper. Vinegar or lemon juice and some voltage made it simple to copperplate another metal object, like a nail. Copper also makes a good heatsink. We’ve seen Raspberry Pis and similar boards with heatsinks that cost an integer number of pennies, because that’s all they were. An oxidized penny shows up in some foxhole radios. They were also handy little weights if you made a balance or for taming a wobbly ceiling fan.
If you were a real kid chemist, you might have done the classic trick of turning a penny into “silver” and then “gold.” You used not-so-lovely-to-handle sodium hydroxide, some zinc, and a flame to actually convert the penny to brass. It wasn’t really a precious metal, but still a good trick if you were a kid with a chemistry set. As the video from [Simon] below shows, that will still work with the copperplate pennies.
New Pennies
Not that you can’t have fun with zinc pennies. If you scratch the plating a bit and dip it in HCL, the zinc core fizzes away. What’s left is a hollow copper penny. If you don’t like using HCL, we hear you can do it over a stove and simply melt the zinc. We wouldn’t try either one of those without a vent hood and an unhealthy disregard for your personal safety, so, you know, don’t do that. But know that you could. [Craig] shows how to remove the zinc or the copper in the video below.
The legality of all this has always been a little suspect. Since 2006, it has been illegal to melt down coins for their metal value. Technically, using it in a science class probably won’t bring the Treasury agents swooping into your classroom, but you have been warned.
Household Hacker
Of course, it is going to take some time for all the pennies to really vanish. There are plenty of them, and you can still get around a hundred for a buck. But when they are gone, what other household items are easy to hack for science? Aluminum foil, maybe? Tell us your favorite in the comments.
Whether they were copper slugs or thinly plated zinc tokens, pennies were a weirdly perfect hacker material: cheap, conductive, sacrificial, and everywhere. We’ll miss them.
Featured image: “wealth of pennies” by [Reza]
feed them to a coin star (do they still make those) and let the mint dispose of them for you.
12.9% plus a 0.99 transaction fee.
SCREW COINSTAR
most banks will give you coin wrappers for free and will give you 100% value of whatever you deposit.
If you look around, some coinstars will give you gift cards to selected merchants for “free” (presumably, the merchant pays your coinstar fee). So you put in $100 of coins, get a $100 gift card. Sure, you can only spend it there, but if it is somewhere you’d spend at anyway…
So if I fed the machine only 1 cent, I’d owe them $1??
So if modern USA pennies are copper and zinc in one convenient package, then you don’t need to take apart a D cell to harvest its zinc to make a penny-zinc battery anymore (yes, we got the irony of it at the time).
Just sand off one side of the penny to expose the zinc, and stack them up with the appropriate paper towel/salt electrolyte sandwich.
are the war time steel pennies iron-y?
“as the cost of minting one far outweighs its value”
Ugh. That’s not how money works!
Look, I’m not saying it is or isn’t time to get rid of the penny. Under any condition other than a really bad recession there will be inflation so while not at a constant rate, the value of any unit of money falls over time. And yes, the time comes to get rid of the smaller stuff. Is that time here? I neither know nor care. I just wish people wouldn’t always be trying to simplify things so much then talking like they know when they do not. It enables a lot of bad politics.
Anyway, if it is time to eliminate the penny it isn’t because the cost of minting a penny is greater than 1¢.
Look, if I offered to make you a penny. But you had to pay the cost of doing so. Obviously that is a bum deal, you wouldn’t take it. The value of A PENNY is 1¢.
However, that’s not how mints work. The government doesn’t just print it’s own money to spend. To do so would create massive inflation. Only desperate nations that are about to fall do that. They only print what is needed to replace damaged old coins and bills plus a bit to cover inflation. The government’s own expenses are paid for by taxes, not mints.
What they do mint money for is the value it brings to the economy in enabling easy transactions. Easier transactions mean more transactions. It’s an important part of a healthy economy.
So what is the value of THE PENNY? It’s not the same as the value of A PENNY. The value of the penny is that we can make transactions with granularity down to 1¢. Without that prices will be rounded up to the nearest increment of 5, the nickel. And how about sales tax? It varies by state but it’s likely to take your even-nickel price and turn it into something that cannot be represented without a penny. So.. more rounding up.
With everything will be rounded up. What’s the worst you can lose? 4¢? Ok, that’s not a lot. But… that’s a potential 4¢ on every transaction!
Remember the story about the guy who hacked his company’s accounting software to pay everyone’s fractional-cent pay which previously had been truncated over to his own account? Well.. the next version of that becomes fraction of a nickel! On the scale of the entire national economy that is HUGE!
See, the value of a unit of currency existing is not limited to the value of the money it represents.
Still not convinced?
Ok.
That 1 penny, which the mint spend more than 1¢ to create… That’s 1¢ of transactions in our economy EVERY time it is spent. How many times do you think that coin gets spent before it is lost or destroyed? Is that still less than the cost of making it? I doubt it.
Again… the real point… pretending things are simple can lead to incorrect conclusions. Embrace the complexity of the real world. Kindergarten arithmetic is perfectly suited for making change with the ice-cream truck guy but not a good way to run an economy.
“That 1 penny, which the mint spend more than 1¢ to create… That’s 1¢ of transactions in our economy EVERY time it is spent. How many times do you think that coin gets spent before it is lost or destroyed? Is that still less than the cost of making it? I doubt it.”
Economics of a plastic card with whatever one wants to stamp or put on it is better, and weighs in aggregate a lot less.
Well I think you are assuming when people say that they mean their face value. That’s probably been a negative balance almost from the start. I take it as meaning the “value of it” not the “face value of the currency” — ambiguous, but then again, none of that was really the point.