The old British penny once had to contain a penny's worth of copper
In 1797 Britain insisted a coin should hold metal worth its face value, so each new copper penny weighed a full ounce. The result was a coin so big, with a rim so thick, that people called it a cartwheel, and rising copper prices soon sent many into melting pots.
Before Decimal Day in 1971, a pound split into 20 shillings of 12 pence each, so a penny was one 240th of a pound. Its symbol, d, came from the Roman denarius. The coin began in silver, but silver pennies grew so costly to make that they shrank over the years, and minting them for everyday use stopped in 1660. For more than a century afterwards pennies were struck only as Maundy money, ceremonial coins given out by the monarch.
The shortage became serious under George III, and merchants and mining companies filled the gap with their own copper tokens. In 1797 the government let Matthew Boulton strike copper pennies at his Soho Mint in Birmingham. They were marked 1797 even though production ran over several years. When copper prices climbed, the official coins were melted and private tokens returned, until an 1817 act banned private token-making under severe penalties.
By 1857 a Royal Mint survey found about a third of copper coins worn or defaced, often with advertisements stamped on them. Master of the Mint Thomas Graham persuaded William Gladstone to replace the whole lot, and from 1860 pennies were made of bronze, freed at last from matching their metal value. Later alloy changes kept the same weight and size, because coin-operated amusement machines and telephones had come to depend on them.
Some pennies became rarities. Only six or seven were made in 1933, for George V to lay under foundation stones, and one vanished when a Leeds church was demolished in the 1960s. The coin was withdrawn on 1 September 1971, a little over six months after decimalisation.
Source: Penny (British pre-decimal coin)
