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V4 2001 INDEX       E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

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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