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Question for early copper collectors- "classic heads"
rhedden
Posts: 6,650 ✭✭✭✭✭
Many time on these boards, we have stated that it is difficult to find nice Classic Head large cents (1808-1814) because the planchets used to produce these coins were made of nearly pure copper, and they were subject to corrosion and other problems. However, if you look at the half cents from 1808-1810, you will see that many nice examples are available (especially 1809) without corrosion, on seemingly nice planchets. 1811 half cents would be an exception. Why is it that the 1808-1810 half cents are found so much nicer? I suppose that they saw less circulation, but it seems that they should have been made out of the same copper as the large cents of the era, and therefore would be subject to the same planchet problems. Does anyone have a logical explanation for the abundance of nicer half cents? Were they made from a different batch of copper?
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That may have played a difference in the problems.
The planchets were stored in large kegs for the journey across the Atlantic. Because of their size and convenient weight, these kegs of copper planchets were typically stored in the lowest part of the ship to serve as ballast. Often, a ship would not offload any or all of the kegs (instead, offloading other cargo stored higher up on the ship) after just one trip from England to the US. If the ship captain needed the kegs for ballast, they were kept a while longer for another journey across the ocean or in the Carribean. So finally -- maybe after many months, or in some cases years? -- the kegs get delivered. They have been exposed to a tough environment for a long time, right? Well, the mint didn't have any first in, first out or just in time delivery policies back then, so the kegs would sit in storage at the mint until ready for use (prolonging the corrosion). Further, since these kegs were heavy and nobody would want to move them around to use "the old ones" before using "the new ones" it was quite likely that some kegs sat in storage for a few years at the back of the heap before being pulled out for minting.
I don't know if this rings true with specialists in the field, but it sure sounded plausible to me.
As to why the half cent planchets from 1808-1810 were so much nicer than the cents from that era, I think the answer would probably be found by examining the delivery records for the blanks. Mintages for the half cents were much lower than that of the cents and a shipment of planchets tended to last much longer. I don't believe there were any deliveries of planchets during that period, and all of the half cents struck were from a shipment that was recieved back in 1806 or 07 when the planchets were still of the hard smooth variety. The Breen half cent book would be the place to check on this. He does list the delivery dates for the planchets.
Thanks- the idea of an earlier batch of planchets being used for half cents makes sense to me. Perhaps if that old copper stock from 1806-7 had already been cut into blank planchets for half cents, which were in storage, that might explain why the same copper was not used for large cent production. Does that idea sound plausible?
Trying to reconstruct the deliveries from the information in Breen is a bit difficult as his descriptions of usage and times when planchets ran out etc are conflicting. But it does look like the idea that the Mint had a large stockpile of quality planchets that lasted them through the "bad copper" years of 1808 -1814 is probably the answer.
I'm impressed that you even knew where to look for information like this... and I do think you nailed it. Most of the really nice half cents of the era that I see are high grade 1808 or 1809 coins. This all makes total sense now. I wish I could say the same for the 1808-1809 large cents- those poor ugly dogs. They usually have more pits & craters than the surface of the moon.