Will the demise of the US penny damage science education?

With the Trump administration having minted America’s last-ever one-cent coins, Robert P Crease wonders what the loss of the US penny will do to science education Lasting legacy The final US pennies were minted in late 2025, some 232 years after the first. (Shutterstock/steve estvanik) Let us mourn the demise of the American penny. With each of the one-cent coins costing about three cents to make, it was “wasteful” to keep producing them, pronounced President Trump . US pennies won’t vanish soon. While the last was minted in November 2025, about 250 billion will remain in circulation for a time despite the rising number of cash-free transactions. The US penny has been around since 1793. Lamenting its passing is faintly obscene compared to other things that the US government has done lately, such as terminating science agencies, cutting jobs, and slashing budgets, environmental regulations and vaccine research. But I can’t stop thinking about what the penny meant to my own science education. Science collaborators Pennies, which until the early 1980s were 95% copper, taught me about corrosion. I learned, for instance, that the Statue of Liberty’s green colour is due to oxidized copper. At school, we were taught how to make pennies a light shade of green by immersing them in salt and vinegar; a plant food such as Miracle Gro works even better as it contains ammonia. We were then instructed to figure out how to clean off the green, discovering that an acid like lemon juice did the trick. When I placed a drop of water on the surface of a penny, the dome-like shape it adopted – caused simply by surface tension – was an impressive sight. My first lessons on ions, meanwhile, involved placing pennies and steel nails in a bath of salt and vinegar: the nails got electroplated with copper; the pennies with zinc. We also had to determine the density of pennies, which are 19 mm in diameter and 1.52 mm thick, by submerging them in a graduated cylinder to find their volume and the weighing them to determine their mass. From 1983 – years after my high-school career – this exercise turned more interesting still because pennies became 97.5% zinc and were only plated with copper so you had to be eagle-eyed to tell old and new apart. Pennies were indispensable lab props too. All the kilogram weights for mechanics experiments were bags of 400 pennies (the 1983+ penny weighing exactly 2.50 g). They were great for coin-tossing in statistics classes too, although I assume other coins gave the same result, even if that was an experiment we never tried. The humble penny wasn’t some piece of lab equipment manufactured by an educational company but a familiar part of our world The humble penny was effective for all these uses because it wasn’t some piece of lab equipment manufactured by an educational company but a familiar part of our world. The coins were cheap and available, and nobody cared if you lost them or took a few home. You could stick pennies under a leg to prop