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The E-Sylum:  Volume 4, Number 15, April 8, 2001, Article 3

1943 STEEL CENT CHEMIST DIES 

   From a New York Times obituary reprinted in a local 
   paper Sunday, April 8th: 

   "Henry Brown, a chemist who helped make the American 
   Dream a gleaming reality by finding new ways of keeping 
   chromium plate bright and shiny, died March 15th at his 
   home in Palo Alto, Calif.  He was 93. 

   In the years just after World War II, Mr. Brown's 
   discoveries made bathroom fixtures and kitchen utensils 
   silvery and put the gloss on the bumpers of the finny 
   automotive monsters Detroit turned out in the 1950's and 
   early '60's. 

   But there had been other earlier and less obvious 
   beneficiaries of his skill at making dull metals shiny. 
   In the austere war years, he showed the U.S. Treasury 
   how to make steel pennies gleam and invented a high- 
   speed process for brass-plating shell cases so they did 
   not stick in artillery guns. .... He was one of the authors 
   of "Modern Electroplating", (Wiley Interscience, 1974) 
   a standard work on the subject." 

   Perhaps Mr. Brown succeeded too well in making the 
   cents shiny.  From David Lange's "The Complete 
   Guide to Lincoln Cents", "By the middle of 1943 it was 
   already evident that this experiment was an unqualified 
   failure.  So many complaints were received from persons 
   who mistook these cents for dimes that the Mint was 
   already preparing to return to the copper and zinc alloy 
   used for most of 1942." 

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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