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??
I suppose the people who have a lot of loose change laying around and the people who have a lot of free time to wrap the coins up overlaps quite a bit;)
I wrapped up most of my change a few week back using a cheapo coin sorter Ive had for years. $400 in quarters(40x$10), $350 in dimes (70x$5), $200 in nickels (100x$2), and $50 in pennies (100x$0.50). Took a little over 2 hours while watching TV.
WAAAY better than losing $130 at a coinstar.
None of the banks I’ve called will take rolled coins.
the CoinStar at my nearest grocery store doesn’t have any fees.
Your bank won’t take rolled coins? That’s crazy! I wonder why they won’t do that.
For those that don’t know, for context, the US mint stopped pressing Pennie’s.
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There is no process for getting rid of Pennies. There is an excellent article in The Atlantic (paywall but maybe you can get a free article or two) about how the US mint abruptly stopped minting pennies, how they were a useless waste anyway, why they exist at all and the deeply mystifying utter and complete lack of a plan, at all, for what to do now. Disposal, it’s tons and tons of basically useless landfill waste, since zinc cannot be recycled anywhere close to safely, and nothing about what retailers etc are supposed to do. everyone rounds up?
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.
Yes it does, to some extent, and yes it does do that as a result.
The government doesn’t create money directly. It sells bonds, which the FED buys off the market and uses them to increase reserves. The reserves can then be used to increase the money supply, so the FED is in control of keeping the supply of money in alignment with the size of the economy to the 2% inflation target. The US government does issue more bonds faster than the old ones “mature”, to pay for some of its deficit, which means it is essentially printing money for itself to spend, and has been doing so since the 1980’s. Clinton was the last president to try and balance the books.
The US government also owns the mint, so they could make themselves coins and create money directly, but the creation of new money that way is too slow to impact inflation and there’s often a shortage rather than excess of coinage.
“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.”
Uhm, if mints only make enough money to replace the money in circulation – how did that money in circulation get printed in the first place? Are you saying that we have the same number of dollars in circulation today that we had in 1985?
Central banks print currency well in excess of replacement volumes. That is why the Fed targets a 2% inflation rate – to ensure enough money is in circulation to support an expanding economy without inflation getting out of control (Zimbabwe) or constraining the growth of the economy or triggering deflation.
The creation of a penny creates 1 cent of money. You can say that minting the penny creates 1 cent of value in the economy. But you destroy several cents of value in order to do that. That a penny is involved in multiple transactions is just transferring that one cent among people until it is moved to the place of greatest value (which usually means ending up in a bowl somewhere almost immediately).
Coins typically stay in circulation for an average of 25 to 30 years
Eliminating the penny is only expected to save around $56 million annually.
Trump’s first term golf trips cost taxpayers $151.5 million over four years.
A little less than 3 years of penny minting.
Eliminating the penny isnt about saving money. Its just an excuse to nibble away a bit more of our earnings at the till. Nothing will really get “rounded down” because prices will just be “nudged up” instead so everything rounds higher not lower.
The real problem with the penny, as detailed elsewhere, is that the mint produces tons of these. To be used once and then vanish. Well, not vanish. Go into a coin jar or some such to gather dust. If all of the pennies in “circulation” were returned at once, it would overwhelm the system.
I attempt, mostly, to carry around a little change. Quarters, dimes, nickels, and four pennies. But I don’t always so I also collect coins.
Every once in a while, I will grab the collection, count, and roll. After seeing something on the big deal with copper pennies, I also used a small scale to sort out the zinc ones. So I have a small collection of copper pennies. Just in case. :-)
Three is an excellent article referenced above that explains how useless Pennies are. They basically go from mint to retailers to give as change then to sock drawers, couch cushions etc. and then landfill. Since moving or using or even recycling them is always a loss. almost no individual one uses or pennies at all to pay for stuff and certainly not as many as they get as change- even us luddites that still use cash.
That one way flow was why even if a coin is “good” or holds up for decades the mint still has to keep hammering them out for what is essentially single-use the majority of the time. It’s totally useless. Worse than useless.
Sorry man. you are really wrong about most of your comment. I recommend you read the “real” article in Atlantic or the New York Times one “America Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny” before you really did your heels in on this one. One example:
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“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.”
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From the article I referenced above:
“300 billion pennies—all of them still and indefinitely legal currency—constitute approximately zero percent of the total money supply of the United States (0.0 percent if rounding to one decimal place). The millions of dollars the government loses by paying more than three cents to manufacture one-cent coins represents an infinitesimal fraction of 1 percent of the government’s several-trillion-dollar budget.”
Economics is not a science, and economists should be treated like fortune-tellers (i.e. disregarded). I didn’t even read your post, nor should anyone else.
Do you know that boar rider from Bleach, who has a clock on his back? I’m planning to make a figurine of him with the clock actually working. In theory I could make gears from pennies (what a funny world btw, you know). I could make a holder with a drill bit guide to drill a center hole. Then install a rod in it, spin it with “Dremel” like in a lathe to get a desired radius and finally make teeth with some holder for precise rotation and “Dremel” blade approach (maybe some pantograph), also DIY.
One of the great uses of a penny, in a bygone era, was to put it in the fuse box*. Of course, you had to have an “unhealthy disregard for your personal safety.”
(*A fuse box was the predecessor to the modern electrical panel or breaker box.)
I can think of a better way to “spend a penny”. I say bring back the mil and the 3 cent piece!
I have about 20lbs of pre-1982 pennies that my dad and I rolled up back in 1982. Still waiting for the day that they’re worth something. The coffee can of pre-1964 silver quarters that he collected in 1964 were worth something, but I don’t know what ever happened to them.
Shit. How will I work my Penny Racers now!?
Or penny loafers.
Three dimes, two nickels, one quarter, zero pennies.
I saw a then-old-now-probably-collectable kids-science book that showed how you could make a battery from copper pennies and silver dimes. Old = sometime in the 1950s or early 1960s.
For the non-Americans: The last mass-produced-for-circulation 90%-silver dimes ($0.10), quarters ($0.25), and half dollars ($0.50) were minted in 1964.
I appreciate the effort to reduce culture assumptions, but clarifying that a quarter is one quarter and a half dollar is half a dollar is funny to me.