I’m a closet numismatist (translation: coin nut).
You could give me a handful of change and I’d be able to sift out in half-seconds which coins have silver content, which pennies are from before 1953. And this is where we must all pause: the penny.
The penny is survived by its decimal series siblings the nickel, dime, quarter, (non-circulating) half-dollar, loonie and toonie. Throughout its 154 year history, the penny has undergone several metamorphoses, devalued from nearly pure copper to electro-plated steel (its American cousin opted for this route in 1987).
As a side note, currency devaluation was quite common in the early days of the gold standard economy when the king would recall the coinage, melt it down, alloy it with cheaper metals but keep the face value.
But how well do we know the life of the penny apart from being an off-colour nuisance and costing 1.6 cents each to produce?
The penny has fuzzy origins.
In the early colonial days, our money was British, and so British halfpennies (known as ha’pennies) were common, as was an epidemic of bad counterfeits. The Bank of Canada issued its own penny token in the 1850s, and it wasn’t until 1858 we finally had a standard coin of the realm; however, British currency was still the popular favourite until 1876 due to issues of economic legitimacy and a mild resistance to decimalization.
What coin collectors call the ‘large cents’ (about the size of a modern quarter) had a run of 62 years (actually less if you consider the ‘silence’ between 1859-76) before the price of copper and harmonization of coin sizes with the United States forced us to adopt the ‘small cents’ in 1921.
Our iconic maple leaf penny was introduced in 1937 with the coronation of King George VI (as was the beaver nickel, the Bluenose II dime and the caribou quarter). This design, by George Kruger Gray, lasted until the penny’s discontinuation with this year’s federal budget.
But even in the penny’s longest ‘stable’ appearance there were some changes:
- In 1947, there were two issues of the penny, one identical to that of 1946, and the other with an asterisk beneath the date to note King George VI’s change of status as being no longer Emperor of India;
- The confederation series of 1967 which sports a dove rather than the maple leaf;
- The shift in 1982 to make the penny dodecagonal (12-sided) to assist the visibility impaired until 1997 when it resumed its round rim. (Fact: the adoption of edged coinage was initially introduced in the 18th century to prevent ‘clipping’; i.e., the shaving off of slivers to mint counterfeit coins since coins were valued by weight.)
The penny does not end its distinguished career entirely; apart from still being accepted currency, it is our ‘base unit’ in decimal coinage and so remains the basis of our money. It will be absent as a physical piece, but still counted in cheques and debit transactions.
The melt-value of any pennies dated before 1997 will be about two cents, although I don’t advise hoarding and selling all those pickle jars’ worth of them.
Originally, the size of the penny was indexed on how many nails you could buy (ten-penny nails = 10 nails for a penny).
And now?
We may lose a long heritage of terms and proverbs associated with the penny: a penny for your thoughts, penny wise and pound foolish, my two cents, penny dreadful, Penny Lane and the list goes on. The penny may be the victim of a federal budget, but it will live on in our collective memory.
Kane X. Faucher, a Faculty of Information and Media Studies professor, is the author of several novel, most recently The Infinite Library.