The melt value of old copper pennies (pre-19820 is three times their stated value of one cent. From Ron Paul at birchgold.com:
Way back in 1982, two interesting things happened.
The first was the publication of the minority report fellow Gold Commission member Lewis Lehrman and I co-wrote as The Case for Gold. (I’m currently working with Birch Gold Group to release a new edition of this book in the near future.) Now, I understand that might not be as interesting to everyone as it was to sound-money advocates like myself.
I’m sure you remember the second interesting thing, though…
Here’s how journalist David Owen described it:
Several years ago, Walter Luhrman, a metallurgist in southern Ohio, discovered a copper deposit of tantalizing richness. North America’s largest copper mine – a vast open-pit complex in Arizona – usually has to process a ton of ore in order to produce ten pounds of pure copper; Luhrman’s mine, by contrast, yielded the same ten pounds from just thirty or forty pounds of ore.
The only problem was, Luhrman’s incredibly profitable copper mine wasn’t a hole in the ground. Instead of ore, Luhrman’s company Jackson Metals processed pennies. He’d figured out a way to melt them down and separate their 97.5% copper from their 2.5% zinc and sell the metal.
Since 1793, U.S. pennies have been made of copper (except for 1943 – when the U.S. Mint’s copper stockpiles went to the war effort). The amount of copper in each penny and its purity ranged from 88%-100%. All the way up to September, 1982.
That’s when inflation weakened the U.S. dollar to the point that, and I swear I’m not making this up, the price of the penny’s copper content rose above 1¢.
