A penny for your thoughts? How much does that penny weigh? The US Mint has the answer at this web-page, along with more specifications for the penny as well as for other coinage. The web-page gives the weight of the penny as 2.500 grams. That must of course be the target-weight for manufacturing or "minting" pennies, with the actual weights having a Gaussian distribution about the target weight. It would be interesting to know how the average weights of coins trends over their lifetimes (30 years). My guess is that the effects of wear and of accretion and oxidation combine to greatly spread the distribution of weights, but the net effect is probably slight.
A few trivial tidbits from the US Mint web-page:
- The penny is copper-plated Zinc, not pure copper. In fact the copper-plating accounts for only 2.5% of the weight. Of course that makes sense; a pure-copper penny would be unacceptably soft.
- The nickel weighs in at 5.000 grams, twice that of the penny.
- The composition of the nickel, dime and quarter is the same Cupro-Nickel, consisting of 8.33% nickel (Ni) and the balance in copper (Cu).
That's more than a penny's worth of coinage trivia. Don't spend it all in one place.
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