March/April 2003
Tom Mele
Throughout the 20th century, copper was a relatively low-priced metal. For the 100 years from 1900 through 1999, in fact, the metal’s annual average U.S. producer price was about 40 cents a pound, with its low coming in 1932 when it fell to 5.8 cents a pound. At that time and into the early 1940s, copper was undeniably in plentiful supply.
World War II changed all that. Once the United States entered the war, copper was needed for armament production. As a result, the War Production Board rationed the red metal and upgraded scrap yards to “metal collection depots” to aid the war effort. All of a sudden, the low-profile scrap industry became quite high-profile as citizens throughout the country flocked to scrap yards and scrap drives.
Sensing the growing metal shortage, the U.S. Mint—a major consumer of primary copper, which it used to make pennies and in alloys for other coins—began experimenting to find possible alternative materials. It tried glass, but the material readily broke into shards. Zinc seemed promising, but the War Production Board soon put that material on allocation as well. Plastic seemed a good alternative, so the Mint secretly bought a button company in Connecticut to test the material. Soon thereafter, the government placed controls on plastic, so the search continued.
Beginning in 1941, the government also froze the U.S. producer price of copper at 12 cents a pound (where it remained frozen until 1946) while copper scrap prices ranged from 8 to 10 cents.
Recognizing that coinage was secondary to the war effort, Congress passed a bill in September 1942 allowing substitute metals to be used for low-value coins. For the penny, the Mint settled on steel with a zinc coating, and it proceeded to stamp more than a billion “white pennies” in 1943. This switch in materials diverted 3.3 million pounds of copper to war production.
The zinc-plated cents quickly became unpopular. When new, their bright, silvery appearance made them resemble dimes, but they quickly oxidized to an unattractive blue-black color. In addition, the pennies were magnetic and lightweight, so they failed to work in most vending machines. Some people refused to accept them in change. When they started to rust, others simply threw them away. Sensing a public relations problem, the Mint went back to the design table and came up with a solution: It would use scrap brass to make pennies.
By the end of 1943, there was an abundance of cartridge-brass scrap from munitions factories and spent naval shells. The scrap industry was called upon to process and ship this metal to the brass strip mills in Connecticut’s Brass Valley. By adding some copper to the 70/30 composition, these mills produced a brass alloy (95 percent copper, 5 percent zinc) that closely resembled the standard bronze alloy (95 percent copper, 5 percent tin and zinc) used by the Mint since 1864.
The 1944 brass pennies were a little off color, but the weight and durability were identical to prewar cents. For three years, the Mint relied on the flow of cartridge-brass scrap to meet its metal needs. By the end of the 1946, the scrap metal community had supplied 35 million pounds of brass—enough shell cases to produce 5 billion pennies.
After the war, in 1947, pennies returned to their old composition while scrap metal dealers gratefully returned to their prewar anonymity.
These days, it’s rare to find a 1943 white penny in circulation. If you check your change, however, you might find a brass one from 1944, 1945, or 1946. If you do, set it aside (or give it to a kid) as a reminder of the scrap industry’s role in the World War II chapter of American history. •
—Tom Mele, Connecticut Metal Industries Inc. (Monroe, Conn.)
Throughout the 20th century, copper was a relatively low-priced metal. For the 100 years from 1900 through 1999, in fact, the metal’s annual average U.S. producer price was about 40 cents a pound, with its low coming in 1932 when it fell to 5.8 cents a pound. At that time and into the early 1940s, copper was undeniably in plentiful supply.