1 Cent 1859: Brass Or Bronze?

If you are a member of the RCNA, you can look up the paper I wrote with Rob Turner and Bill Hall on the 1859 brass cent. March 2012 issue.

Curious coin, the only true way to determine if that coin is brass is by having it tested using an XRF machine. this will x-ray the coin and determine the metals used. no one on this forum could tell you 100% it is brass with out this test.

I would recommend you finding a local coin shop and have them look at it, they may have one of these, or know where or who you can contact.

colonialjohn: What coin are you talking about... the one from a few years ago or the one from a few days ago? Were there pics uploaded to look at? If you look at the entry above in 2014, by SPP, I helped him with the XRF research that we did on the 1859 brass cents ... I am Bill. The "brass" 1859 cents constitute a verbal misnomer .. the '59 "brass cents were caused by an alloy mixing problem with the planchets. They were never meant to start out as brass cents ... the 95% copper, 4% tin and 1% zinc either stayed in the crucible too long and separated into semi-layers or was floating on top, before being poured into the small ingots. Some portion of the ingots then had a much higher zinc content so that, when the ingots were rolled into sheets, portions of the sheets alloyed out to be more like brass than the required bronze. There are over 25 different types or alloys of "brass", many of which have both zinc and tin in the alloy just like bronze. For our study on the 59's, we used the lowest copper content, highest zinc and lowest tin that could still be classified technically as brass.

From the well more than 500 1859's XRF'd, we found that the copper ranged from 90.9% to 95.98 and zinc ranged from 1.63 to 1.85. Needless to say, we found nothing that we could classify as brass, although we DID have access to the XRF or spectro stats on 2 coins that WERE classified as brass to serve as a target. In most of the XRF'd 1859's, there were traces of other elements ... iron, arsenic, lead, etc.

In your post from 1 March, you were talking about the visible "color" of the coins/tokens. From someone who had to shine many many brass cannons early on in my military life, I can tell you that the same brass cannon can change to many colors depending on what it comes in contact with, whether liquid or airborne. And from looking at 10's of thousands of 1859 cents, I can tell you that all kinds of colors are prevalent in them, depending upon which household cleaner that someone at some time used on them. You can turn the bronziest 1859 into the brassiest yellow you ever saw with a little 409 or spic & span or anything else under the sink. You can turn black to yellow in a heartbeat. Likewise you can can take a normal bronze cent out from the ground and have it appear "brassy" just from the alkaline content of the soil... XRF or spectro is the only way to tell the brass from the bronze.

I can't wait to get your book on the tokens, knowing that you have based your findings on actual XRF results, rather than "it looks like yellow". I had a couple of members of this site asking me to try to explain what you had in your post about "color". I think that many thought that they had or have had a brass '59 just because someone doused it with an oxidizing agent from any number of household cleaners at some time in its life.

Sorry guys, I was responding to Curious coins post, I wanted to give him a good idea of how to proceed to verify that his coin is brass or not.

I would bet my entire lunch on that the original coin in this thread is just a toned bronze. (Don't underestimate how much I value my lunch!!)

I use a research-level XRF with my daily research, and having access to that instrument and a semi-quantitative SEM has been a fun experience with the 1859 cents. I also have collaborated with Chris Falkner on Upper and Lower Canada tokens... and I can pretty much say with confidence, that colour is NOT a reliable indicator of defining bronze versus brass... I am in the processing of writing a paper for the CN journal on this very topic, entitled "So you think you have an 1859 Brass Cent?" I had the pleasure of analyzing and photographing "yellow" 1859 coins that members and dealers alike had sent me over the years, with fingers crossed, only to learn they had a lovely yellow toned bronze cent....