1946-S Variety WWHO-001

Description

San Francisco's expression of the foundational doubled working hub variety for the inaugural Roosevelt dime, WWHO-001 at the S-mint shows a spread towards the center on the date, designer John R. Sinnock's initials JS, and slightly on the motto IN GOD WE TRUST. This variety traces its origin to a hub-level doubling event — a misaligned secondary impression on the working hub at Philadelphia — that propagated to working dies distributed to all three mint facilities producing dimes in 1946. The Wexler Team cataloged this under Wexler Variety ID: 1946-P,D,S 10c WWHO-001, explicitly noting that doubling from this doubled working hub can be found on working dies from all three Mints. San Francisco struck approximately 27.9 million Roosevelt dimes in 1946, the smallest mintage among the three facilities for the type's debut year, making S-mint specimens the scarcest branch-mint expression of this hub doubling. Because WWHO-001 originates at the working hub level rather than on individual working dies, die markers for both obverse and reverse will vary across individual working dies — each die inherited the shared hub doubling but developed its own unique scratches, gouges, and wear patterns during production. The Wexler commentary notes that slight differences in the appearance of the doubling may be observed across working dies due to multiple factors: wear to the working hub reducing the sharpness of the doubled impression on later dies, wear to each working die softening the doubling during its production life, abrading of working dies during maintenance procedures, and normal wear on the coins themselves. This multi-factor variability makes WWHO-001 an instructive example of how a single upstream doubling event can manifest with different visual intensities across the population of coins struck from the affected hub's descendant dies.

Attribution History

• Discovered by Various individuals Cross References: None known Comments: Slight differences in the appearance of the doubling may be seen on the working dies. A number of factors can contribute to these differences including wear to the working hub, wear to the working die, abrading the working die, and wear to the coins.
• None known Comments: Slight differences in the appearance of the doubling may be seen on the working dies. A number of factors can contribute to these differences including wear to the working hub, wear to the working die, abrading the working die, and wear to the coins.; Wexler Variety ID: 1946-P,D,S 10¢ WWHO-001
• Expert attribution by Wexler Team

External References