1944 Doubled Die Obverse WDDO-014

Description

Fourteenth DDO in the Wexler catalog for the 1944 Philadelphia Wheat Cent, building the body of documented hub doubling events for a date whose 1.43 billion coin mintage drove die production to wartime peak rates. Shell-case brass planchets — the War Production Board's answer to copper conservation — were refined from collected military ammunition casings and rolled into strip at the Philadelphia Mint's own planchet preparation facility. Wexler Variety ID: 1944 1¢ WDDO-014 is the sole published attribution. Fourteen DDO varieties through this catalog position represents a robust but not unprecedented count, with 1943 and 1946 both exceeding this figure significantly. Each numbered variety preserves evidence of a specific hubbing session where the master hub and working die failed to align within acceptable tolerances — the multi-impression hubbing process used during the 1940s requiring the hub to impress the die several times to achieve full design depth, with any shift between impressions permanently encoded as doubling. No die markers or alternative cross-references have been documented.

Attribution History

• Wexler Variety ID: 1944 1¢ WDDO-014
• Expert attribution by Wexler Team

External References