Pressed Penny Machine Map

I love penny smashers. I have a paradoxical attitude toward souvenirs: on one hand, I like to have reminders of places I've visited as well as a physical token of "proof" that I've been there; on the other hand, I hate household clutter and don't like to spend money on what amounts to junk. Penny smashers fill a perfect role. They are literally a token of proof that I've been to a place, while also taking up almost no space and being very cheap.

This reminds me so deeply of the "old" internet that I can't help but want to get into penny pressing machines just for the sake of wanting to find this website useful to me. Just someone with a passion, cataloging it and sharing it with everyone else with no other ulterior motives.

Are these a thing outside the US?

For anyone who's not familiar: all over the place at tourist attractions and airports you can find mechanical presses that will squish a penny with an embossed image. You pick one of 4 images, put in your penny + a couple of quarters and then turn a big crank handle until your newly pressed penny comes out the other side. You'd then collect squished pennies in a little collector's folio/pouch/thing for later viewing.

I guess now that pennies are getting phased out they'll have to "upgrade" the machines to work with other coins...

There used to be one at the museum of natural history in NYC, where if you didn't have the supplies you could pay a dollar to get 4 quarters to activate the machine and a penny to squish. It was a legit infinite money bug in the real world :-)

If you are into the ones at Walt Disney World, https://www.presscoins.com/

You don't see a lot of sites that use a window.alert() to tell you to sign up like that... would love an about us to know who had the passion to make this.

There are so many “map” websites for all sorts of niche things. Someone should make a “map map” to map out all the maps. Map.

I'm much more interested in the metal typer(?) -- machines that have a custom medallion in them and you get to stamp a message into their circumference letter by letter. Is there any map that lists those?

I wonder if we see these slowly disappear now that the penny is no longer minted for general circulation in the US

There's also https://www.pennycollector.com/

Again my inability to interpret information properly meant that based on the title, I thought this was a pressed penny machine that pressed a map onto a penny! My first thought was, 'How small the map gonna be if it's gonna be on a penny? It's going to be nearly useless in helping you navigate surely?'

There used to be one at the World Trade Center. Before 9/11.

I feel an urge to visit and fill in data for all the nearby ones.

Does anyone know how to get a "good" penny for these machines? Often mine are hard to interpret when they're done and just look like a garbled mess. Do I need a penny that is sufficiently old or what

Now I want a collection of all these. Especially the National Parks !

I hate how they don’t actually press the penny. They have a whole stack of blanks to use.

At least, not a single one I’ve seen.