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.
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Posted 12/10/2025 6:30 pm
