Large cent
coin in the United States
The United States large cent was a coin with a face value of 1⁄100 of a United States dollar. Its nominal diameter was 11⁄8 inch (28.57 mm). The first official mintage of the large cent was in 1793, and its production continued until 1857, when it was officially replaced by the modern-size one-cent coin (commonly called the penny).
Large cents were made of nearly pure copper, or copper as pure as it emerged from smelting, without any deliberate addition of other metals (such as occurs in bronze).
General history
First struck in 1793, the large cent was minted every year from 1793 to 1857, except 1815. When the United States declared war in 1812 against Great Britain, coinage was affected. The wartime embargo against shipments made it so the mint could not get any new copper planchets, which were imported from Great Britain, to strike coins. The mint made do with what supply it had and struck coins into 1815. After the war ended in 1815, the mint wasted no time in ordering new planchets. For an unknown reason, no coins were dated 1815 from the supply the mint had in the interim.
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This entry incorporates text from “Large cent” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.