A prototype for the first U.S. penny will be auctioned for around $1 millionor 100 million times its trading valuelater this month at an auction via Stacks Bowers in Baltimore.
The one-cent piece is part of the Archangel collection, which includes coins from American colonial days through the founding of the U.S. Mint in 1792, says John Kraljevich, senior neumacist at Stacks Bowers.
Every cent every Americans ever had in their pocket draws their lineage back to this one, Kraljevich says.
The penny up for sale was printed in 1792, a year before the U.S. Mint started circulating coin currency. It was the first manifestation of the American dollar system, where a dollar equals 100 cents.
This was novel at the time; in Britains coinage, 12 pence equaled a shilling.
This was the first attempt to make a cent and see if it worked, says James McCartney, a neumacist at Stacks Browers. We dont know how many were made; 10 to 11 probably survived.
When pennies went into circulation a year later, the financial principle remained, but some of the initial design elements were scrapped. The penny featured a depiction of Lady LibertyAbraham Lincoln didnt appear on pennies until the centennial of his birth in 1909but her hair looked different by the time pennies first went into American wallets.
The front also read Liberty Parent of Science & Industry. When the cent went into circulation, this text was simplified to Liberty United States of America.
Ultimately, the pennys size determined the coins future in American hands.
This one just proved too big. It was much bigger than other copper coins. They probably thought it was just too unwieldy to continue, McCarthy says. Then in 1793 they reduced the weight of the cent, and started making smaller cents out of plain copper.
Some of the cents physical features still appear on current pennies.
A lot of people overlook the obvious: its metal, its round. These are things we cant necessarily take for granted with a coin; not all coins are round. Not all coins are made out of metal, Kraljevich says. And it preserved the term one cent, which appears on the rest of one-cent pieces.
The cent was printed in another place of early American importanceon Filbert Street in Philadelphia, the site of the first building the U.S. government ever purchased, Kraljevich says. The site is now underneath the citys Federal Reserve building.
Its history is very closely intertwined with all the romantic notions of our founding fathers, McCartney says.
The piece entered the archangel collection in 1976. Its previous owner was Laird Park, a collector of early American books, coins, and other artifacts from the early Revolutionary War period, who bought the one-cent piece from the Charles Jay collection in 1967.
