Is There Any Difference Between Brass And "Bronze" Pennies?

Oops sorry! LWC and LMCs are modern coins and I posted in classic. Moderator, can you please move this topic?

My guess would be the same reason the 43 is steel, and that is because of demand for zinc for other reasons.

It was called WWII.

A great many metals were critical to the war effort including copper, tin, and nickel. A board was set up to regulate how much of these metals non-defense industries would be permitted to use and that included the mint. Tin was cut off to the mint in 1942, but the law required the cents to be an alloy of 95% copper and 5% tin and zinc. The copper had to be 95% but the other 5% tin and zinc could be varied by the percentage of each one used. So in 42 only a trace of tin was used. Almost the entire mintage of 1942 S cents some 85,590,000 coins weighing 293.5 tons contained just 50 pounds of tin.

In 1943 the amount of copper allowed was cut back again, so much that copper cent production would be impossible and we got the zinc plated steel cents (zinc and low grade steel were not on the restricted list)

In 1944 a new source of material became available to the mint for making coins. Brass shell cases. the military was swimming n the things, and for some reason they couldn't be reused. Industry didn't want them due to the difficulty of recycling brass (when remelted some of the zinc boils off making the final composition questionable.) and the danger of live rounds being mixed in with the casings. But the mint agreed to take them, provided the military sorted them to make sure there were no live rounds, then mix them with enough pure copper to bring them up to 95% and 5% zinc. (With maybe a pre-war cent thrown into each melt to give it the trace of tin required to satisfy the law.) This gave the mint the copper they needed, got rid of a waste product that was giving the military headaches, and got rid of those silver colored cents that everyone hated. A win/win/win situation. After 1946 the war was over the supply of shell cases dwindling, and the availability of copper and tin restored so the cents returned to the pre-war composition.

I have to admit that a good deal of that history comes for Roger Burdette's research.

As to the 1962 change I believe the mint had agian been reducing the amount of tin in the coins, why I don't know unless tin was more expensive than zinc, but I' fairly sure the law was changed in 1962 to eliminate the tin completely and just make the coin copper and zinc.

I believe for safety and health there may be more issues and concerns with tin over zinc