The first penny ever was designed by Benjamin Franklin and minted in 1787. The penny we’re familiar with today, however, adorned with the bust of late American president Abraham Lincoln, was first minted in 1909 and released on February 12th to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth.
The founder of Lost Penny Day, Adrienne Sioux Koopersmith, wrote a log post about her idea, explaining that what she was trying to demonstrate was: “Petty change can make an astounding difference”, which is a positive message indeed, and one we can suspect Honest Abe himself would have supported. In fact, one of Lincoln’s most well-known quotes was, “I walk slowly, but I never walk backward”.
- It’s actually not called a “penny.” The official name is the “one-cent” coin. The word “penny” came from the British denomination of the same name.
- The modern one-cent coin is actually composed mainly of zinc with a copper coating
- The early “pennies” were 29 millimeters wide, or roughly the size of a modern half dollar. These so-called “large cents” were made until 1857, and are still popular with coin collectors.
- If you want to collect pennies, there is one year you’ll never see on an authentic U.S. one-cent coin: 1815. That’s because we used to get the copper for them from an English supplier, but the War of 1812 that pitted us against the U.K. stopped those shipments. The Mint ran out of copper in late 1814, and by the time shipments resumed in late 1815, it was too late to mint pennies with 1815 on them.
- Approximately 30 million pennies per day (1,040 pennies every second) are produced. Each year, the U.S. Mint produces more than 13 billion pennies.
- There are more than 130 billion one-cent coins currently in circulation.
- Since its beginning, the U.S. Mint has produced more than 288.7 billion pennies. Lined up edge to edge, these pennies would circle the earth 137 times.
- During its early penny-making years, the U.S. Mint was so short on copper that it accepted copper utensils, nails and scrap from the public to melt down for the coins.
- The average penny lasts 25 years!
- Pennies were the very first coins minted in the United States. In March 1793, the mint distributed 11,178 copper cents.
- In 2016 it cost the mint 1.5 cents to produce a penny, creating what in the coin world is known as negative seigniorage. That amounted to a loss of almost $46 million on the production of more than nine billion pennies.
- The Lincoln penny was the first cent on which appeared the words, “In God We Trust.”
- More than two-thirds of all coins produced by the U.S. Mint are pennies.
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