Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Abergan.

This day, April 20th, 1787, I think it was actually April 21st in 1787, the Congress of the

Confederation of the United States authorized a design for an official copper penny. This was the country's first coin. It is referred to as

the Fugio scent or the Franklin sent. Ten grams of copper. It was indeed designed by Ben Franklin.

If one of you listening has one of these coins,

this is a good chance to point out that Radiotopia is a

listener supported network.

We can only do this show through the generous contributions of our

audience. These coins are worth a fair amount. No surprise that maybe like

$10,000 or so for some of the rarer mints we'll get into kind of all the different versions of this coin that are floating around, but here to discuss our country's very first coin are, as always, Nicole Hammer of Columbia and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello.

Hello, Jody.

Hey there.

So, Mickey, where do we start?

Why does this country say, we need to make a coin?

Look, a stable currency is something that is very valuable to a country.

And even though it's going to be like a century before the US starts printing its own bank notes,

having a stable hard currency is really important so people are minting

their own copper pennies something they called coppers but they would degrade

over time and people would like chip little pieces off of them and so they were

weighted to the price of copper and if there is less copper in your copper it's worth a lot

less and so people were finding that they were taking a penny from

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