1941 P Lincoln 1c Broken T

1941 is a playground for weirdness. At least two hubs had different broken second "T"s of TRUST. Some of the coins are doubled with one broken "T" over another. One of those hubs then acquired a broken first "T" as well. A few coins have both "T"s broken. At least half of the 1941 Philadelphia cents have double die obverses.

At some point, Philadelphia rehubbed a bunch of partially hubbed 1941 dies, using a hub with an intact first "T" and second "T." Where did they get that hub?

One possibility is that Philadelphia used a 1940 hub, grinding off the zero in the date. At least two rehubbed second "T" coins show what may be traces of the Lifesaver-shaped zero hubbed lightly over the last "1" in 1941. Several others show heavy oval-shaped die polishing around the last "1," likely in an attempt to remove traces of a zero. Philadelphia then may have re-ground the 1940 hub, removing all traces of a zero. If so, this would explain the further coins with a somewhat weak second "1" in 1941. Bolstering this idea, the "4" in many 1941 dates is doubled. (The OPs coin here is one of them.)

Interestingly, very few Denver or San Francisco 1941 cents have the broken second "T." To me, that suggests that the early dies had intact "T"s, and Philadelphia shipped the branch mint dies early, and not again in 1941.

If the 1940 hub was used, then many 1941 cents would be reverse-overdate doubled dies, 1940/1941. If that sounds weird, it is what Philadelphia did in 1949, for the extra dies sent to San Francisco, using a ground-down 1948 hub for the rehubbing. That created the three major 1949-S doubled dies. I personally believe that the 1941 experience is what gave them the idea to do it (again) in 1949.

Yes, but finding the photos will take some time. I have my coin photos on a backup drive, organized by inventory number. I'll have some time this weekend to look.

IMHO, all of the rehubbed "T" cents are 1940/1941, although only two that I have seen so far have what looks like the zero also visible. I'll hunt those down.

Most of the "4" doubling looks like the 4 of 1940 hubbed over the 4 of 1941. Notice the doubling areas I marked on the date from your obverse photo (below). The rehubbed 4 is larger than and different from the 4 of 1941, and the only possible other year with a 4 as the third digit then would have been 1940. I haven't made an overlay of the two "fours" yet. The 1941 DDOs have the rehubbed 4 in about every orientation to try to minimize the evident doubling.

This is a different coin, but it shows the difficulty the Mint had aligning the intact hub "4" with the "4" of 1941 from the first hubbing. This coin has three distinct fours (marked and numbered). The doubling (tripling) is most visible on the point of the primary four, but can be seen east of the foot, at the top point, and on the crosslet, too.

Yes, the first hubbing by a broken "T" hub would be an incomplete first hubbing "T" on the die.

The theory is that the "T"s broke on two of the working hubs, leading to an incomplete first hubbing "T" on many working dies. That is confirmed because there are a couple double dies where the second hubbing was done by a different broken "T" 1941 hub.

The theory is that the Mint then intentionally completed the remaining rehubbings with an intact "T" hub. This process then generated the dozens of intact/incomplete "T" doubled dies. What makes all of this interesting is the distinctly doubled "4" in many dates, with apparent differences in the shape of the second hubbing "4." Unless a 1940 hub was used, the differences in the shape of the "4"s is difficult to explain.

Thanks for following up fortcollins. I'm going to try and take some better closeups of the 41. I don't see the zero on your example though, I wonder if you've seen some uncirculated examples of what you're talking about?

In general I am trying to figure out if grinding down a digit can produce an incuse ghost image on the hub.

In regards to the coin I posted I don't see two T's, just one broken T. How does that fit in with the other examples?

Very interesting! Thanks for sharing all this info.

One of the lines of thought on the high-grade examples not commonly having broken "T"s is that it is usually the first coins struck in a year that people acquire for collections and by rolls, and the "T"s on the hubs broke later in the year. By the time the 1941 broken "T" coins appeared, coins were probably among the last thing on anybody's mind. There are some higher grade examples out there, and some are photographed on the three sites, but they are scarce.

Just from what I'm seeing in the wild, at least half of the Philadelphia 1941 cents are DDOs, the vast majority of them minor: doubled second "T," doubled eyelid, doubled "4" in the date. So many of them are heavily circulated and dinged in ways that make attribution iffy or impossible. I don't have the time (or desire) to spend it trying to attribute an iffy eyelid, so I'm tossing those back into rolls to clear them out. Possibly 10-12% of the total coins are able to be attributed. That's still a lot. The most desired varieties are scarce, and the early stages of those varieties are very scarce in any grade. A few of the varieties are so common that they cause eye rolls when they appear yet again. I'm drowning in DDO-004/1-DO-007s, and they are just getting tossed in a pile so I can pick the nicest looking ones to keep and jettison the rest.

There are so many questions about the 1940 and 1941 cents, and the only answer I can give to these questions is, "I don't know."

Why are there so many Woodies for 1940 and 1941?
Why is the percentage of woodies in Philadelphia cents of 1940 and 1941 so much higher than in Denver and San Francisco cents of those years?
Why are there so many Retained Cuds on 1940-S cents, but far fewer on the other date and mint combinations of 1940 and 1941?
When the "T"s broke in 1941, why didn't the Philadelphia mint simply scrap the dies, make another working hub, and create new dies? They certainly had the equipment, unlike the branch mints.
Did Philadelphia grind down and use a 1940 hub for the second hubbing? If not, why are the "4"s doubled, why does the second "4" look different than the "4" from the first hubbing, and why does the second "4" not fit within the footprint of the first "4"?
Why are so many 1941 Philadelphia die pairs abraded almost to oblivion? What is beneath the abrasions? Why did they abrade both the obverse and reverse dies? And most interestingly, as the dies wear and the underlying issues start to emerge in LDS/VLDS, why isn't there evident die clashing on some of those dies?
Why are there hints of fairly significant doubling on some of the abraded dies (both obverse and reverse)? Why were these dies used at all?

Maybe the answer is simply this. We spend hours looking through microscopes at these coins, but nobody did that in 1941. Held in a hand for commercial purposes, even a coin from a heavily abraded die looks like a coin. The country was trying to recover from the depression, looking at an imminent world war for the second time in 25 years, some goods and food were scarce, jobs were still scarce, and what these coins could buy was far more important than how they looked. And the mint's job was to produce as many circular stamped objects as were needed to keep commerce happening, and saw these cents as that, rather than objects of medallic art.

Wow, that is quite a lot of information on this coin! Thank you FortCollins