How Much Was A Penny Worth In 1793?

Tough to draw a direct comparison but a good guess is somewhere between 50 cents and one dollar equivalent buying power. Depends, of course, on what you are buying. Transportation across great distances would, for example, be extraordinarily expensive and risky relative to modern equivalents. Getting to California in 1793 from New York would be comparable to taking a trip into space.

I think the posters focusing on the purchasing power in that era vs a straight mathematical calculation of historic inflation rates aggregated over time is the way to go. Various products and services are priced wildly different in today's world than in the early days of the republic.

Remember that in the far past, salt was so valuable they paid roman soldiers their salary ("salary" has same etymological root as "salt") in salt. Now you can get salt for almost pennies as extraction, refining, marketing, and transportation technologies have been perfected and have driven its value and cost down.

I'd say the key to getting the answer you need is finding one or more documented examples from the 1790s as far as what a commonly purchased product or service cost and contrast that with the perceived value of one cent today.

This is an excellent reference I used some data from it to come up with the 50 cent estimate:

http://books.google.com/books/about...OpIeAQAAIAAJ

In 1921 the country was in a post war recession as it came down from the industrial build up from WWI. The mint also used this post war slump as a chance to redirect much of their activity toward the recoining of all the silver required under the Pitman act.

In 1914 the west was still rather sparcely settled and also Philadelphia struck a much larger number of cents that year than normal. There probably just wasn't as much need for them. Coinage was probably apportioned to each mint based on local need. If there were plenty of cents available in the Denver distribution area then production would be lowered.

1877, possibly a lowering of coinage due to the flood of silver coins returning to outside the country. Coinage was flooding back into the Treasury including 1 and 5 cent pieces so there was not much need to coin more. Just ship the older coins back out again as needed.