Contenu de l'article

• 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."
  

URL source

• http://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v04n15a03.html

Date publiée

• 2001-04-08

Volume

• 4

Des relations

Auteur NNP

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