Flying Eagle Cent - Inception

Inception

The cent was the first official United States coin to be struck at the Philadelphia Mint in 1793. These pieces, today known as large cents, were made of pure copper and were about the size of a half dollar. They were struck every year, except 1815 due to a shortage of copper, but were slow to become established in commerce. Worn Spanish colonial silver pieces were commonly used as money throughout the United States.

The Mint then struck silver or gold in response to deposits by those holding bullion, and made little profit from those transactions. By the 1840s, profits, or seignorage, from monetizing copper into cents helped fund the Mint. However, in 1849, copper prices rose sharply, causing the Department of the Treasury to investigate possible alternatives to the large one-cent pieces. The cent was unpopular in trade; as it was not a legal tender, nobody had to take it, and banks and merchants often refused it. The cent was disliked for its large size as well, and in 1837, the eccentric New York chemist, Lewis Feuchtwanger had experimented with a smaller cent size in making model coins as part of a plan to sell his alloy (similar to base-metal German silver) to the government as a coinage metal. His pieces circulated as hard times tokens in the recession years of the late 1830s and early 1840s.

By 1850, it was no longer profitable for the Mint to strike cents, and on May 14, New York Senator Daniel S. Dickinson introduced legislation for a cent made out of billon, copper with a small amount of silver. At the time, it was widely felt that coins should contain a large proportion of their face value in metal. The coin would be annular; that is, it would have a hole in the middle. The Mint struck experimental pieces, and found that it was difficult to eject such pieces from the presses where they were struck, and that it was expensive to recover the silver used in the billon. Provisions for a smaller cent were dropped from the legislation that gave congressional approval for the three cent piece in 1851. Numismatic historian Walter Breen suggested that one factor in rejecting the holed coins was that they reminded many of Chinese cash coins with their minimal purchasing value. A drop in copper prices in 1851 and early 1852 made the matter of a smaller cent less urgent at the Department of the Treasury, of which the Bureau of the Mint was part.

Copper prices resurged in late 1852 and into 1853 past the $.40 per pound that the Mint viewed as the break-even point for cent manufacture after considering the cost of production; 1 pound (0.45 kg) of copper made 42⅔ large cents. In 1853, patterns using a base-metal alloy were struck using a quarter eagle obverse die, about the size of a dime. Some of the proposed alloys contained the metal nickel—Pennsylvania industrialist Joseph Wharton, influential in Congress and closely connected to a number of Mint officials, held a monopoly over mining of that metal in North America, and sought its use in coinage. Also considered for use in the cent was "French bronze" (95% copper with the remainder tin and zinc) and various varieties of German silver. In his 1854 annual report, Mint Director James Ross Snowden advocated the issuance of small, bronze cents, as well as the elimination of the half cent, which he described as useless in commerce. A number of pattern cents were struck in 1854 and 1855. These featured various designs, including some showing a head of Liberty and two adaptations of work by the late Mint chief engraver, Christian Gobrecht: one showing a seated Liberty, as appeared on many silver coins of that era, and another of a flying eagle, which Gobrecht had produced based upon a sketch by Titian Peale.