People have paid their way with electrum lions, mulberry-bark notes, copper slabs too heavy to steal and stones too big to move. Here are the surprising stories behind coins and paper money, the bankers, robbers and reformers who shaped banking, and the odd currencies and money myths that turn out to be stranger, or plainer, than the legends.
Every tile in a Money and Coins game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Coins
nine stories
1A king's lion coins held less gold than promised
On the tile: Lydian Lionc. 600 BC
Ancient Greek writers credited the Lydians, a kingdom in Asia Minor, with inventing coins. Their royal coins were small lumps of electrum, a natural blend of gold and silver, stamped with a lion's head. Some carry the name WALWET, which many scholars read as King Alyattes. Even a tiny coin was precious; one just a twenty-fourth of the standard size may have bought a sheep. Yet lab tests show the lions held only about 54 percent gold, though they were valued like natural electrum at about 73 percent. The state kept the difference.
The saying rich as Croesus remembers a real king of Lydia. Earlier Lydian coins were electrum, a mix of gold and silver whose true worth was hard to judge. Around the middle of the 500s BC, Croesus called them in and replaced them with separate coins of pure gold and pure silver. The gold ones became known as Croeseids. In 2002, excavators at Sardis found two tiny coins of the new kind beneath rubble from the city wall, torn down when the Persians captured the city in the 540s BC. That proved the reform came no later than his reign.
Early Chinese money came in odd shapes, including bronze cast like spades and knives. After the ruler of Qin united China in 221 BC and became its First Emperor, he made one coin the standard across his empire: the ban liang, a round bronze disc with a square hole in the middle, already used in his home state. Its two-character inscription gave its weight, half a liang. His dynasty collapsed within 15 years, but round coins with a hole in the center remained the basic form of Chinese money for about two thousand years.
One of the most remarkable English coins of the Middle Ages is written mostly in Arabic. Offa, king of Mercia, had it struck in gold as a copy of a dinar of the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur, dated AD 773 to 774. The engraver clearly could not read Arabic. He copied the script with errors and set OFFA REX, Latin for King Offa, upside down relative to it. Why a Christian king made it is uncertain. The British Museum thinks it was probably meant for trade, since Islamic dinars were then the Mediterranean's most important coins.
In 1516 a silver mine opened near Sankt Joachimsthal, a town in Bohemia's Ore Mountains. From 1519 its silver was struck into big coins called Joachimstalers, meaning coins of Joachim's valley. The name was soon shortened to taler, later thaler, and Low German speakers said daler. English borrowed the word in the 1550s, and by 1600 it was spelled dollar. English colonists in America used it for the Spanish piece of eight, and in 1785 the Continental Congress made the dollar the money unit of the United States.
6The Spanish coin that stayed legal in the U.S. until 1857
On the tile: Piece of Eight1497 to 1857
Spain introduced the silver 8 real coin, the Spanish dollar or piece of eight, in its monetary reforms of 1497. Silver from Mexico, Peru and Bolivia made Spanish coins the most common in the world. The earliest were rough cobs, from cabo de barra, end of the bar, because their blanks were cut from cast silver bars. They were the most common coin in the English colonies, and the U.S. dollar was based on them. They stayed legal tender in the United States until 1857. A quarter dollar equaled two reales, or bits, which is why it is still called two bits.
In 1652 Massachusetts opened a mint in Boston without royal approval, with silversmith John Hull as mintmaster. Its shillings were made about 20 percent lighter than English ones so they would stay in New England. The famous Pine Tree design arrived only around 1667, yet nearly every coin still reads 1652. The story goes that the colony froze the date on purpose because England had no king that year, so no monarch could call the coins defiance. Experts treat that as a theory at best. The date may simply mark the law that created the mint.
In the spring of 1696 Isaac Newton took a government post: Warden of the Royal Mint, then housed in the Tower of London. He arrived amid an enormous recoinage of old silver, some dating back to Elizabeth I. As it wound down, he had more time for his main duty, bringing to justice people who clipped and counterfeited the coin of the realm. One of them, the serial counterfeiter William Chaloner, was convicted of high treason and hanged in 1699. That Christmas Day Newton became Master of the Mint, a post he held until his death in 1727.
The 1804 silver dollar is among the most coveted of all American coins, with only 15 known. Yet no dollar dated 1804 was struck in 1804. The dollars the Mint made that year were dated 1803, and regular silver dollar production then stopped until 1840. The first 1804 dollars were made in 1834 and 1835, when the State Department wanted complete sets of U.S. coins as diplomatic gifts for rulers in Asia who might grant trade concessions. One set went to the King of Siam, and its reappearance in 1962 confirmed the story.
In Sichuan, in western China, everyday money a thousand years ago included heavy iron coins, awkward to carry for any big purchase. At the end of the 900s, financial firms there began issuing paper notes called jiaozi in return for deposits of coin, silk and other goods. The notes caught on, and the leading merchant houses joined forces to issue them. But many firms speculated with the deposits, went bust and could not redeem their bills. In 1023 the Song government took over, turning a merchant's receipt into state-issued paper currency.
2Marco Polo compared the Khan's paper money to alchemy
On the tile: Marco PoloYuan dynasty
Marco Polo was astonished by the money of the Great Khan. It was made, he wrote, from the fine inner bark of mulberry trees, pressed into black sheets and cut to different sizes. Officials signed each note, and a seal in red vermilion made it authentic. Forgery was punished by death, and worn notes could be swapped at the mint for a three percent fee. Polo wrote that "you might say he hath the Secret of Alchemy in perfection." The Mongol rulers of China even banned bronze coins and silver in trade, relying on paper alone.
3Europe's first banknotes, and the banker who paid
On the tile: Palmstruch1661
In 1661 Johan Palmstruch's Stockholms Banco issued Europe's first banknotes. They were interest-free credit notes for fixed sums, backed by money on deposit, and far handier than Sweden's unwieldy copper money. They were a hit, and no rules stopped the bank from printing as many as it liked. It lent more than its deposits could cover, and when too many people wanted their money back at once, the bank collapsed. Palmstruch was tried and sentenced. Yet his failed bank was the forerunner of Sweden's Riksbank, the oldest central bank still operating.
Benjamin Franklin printed nearly 2.5 million paper notes for the American colonies, and he fought counterfeiters with nature itself. By 1739 his Philadelphia shop was printing notes from plates cast from real leaves, so each bill carried raised vein patterns no forger could easily copy. A 2023 study at the University of Notre Dame found more of his tricks: colored silk fibers in the paper, flecks of the mineral muscovite, and a black ink made from graphite. Counterfeiters favored bone black, made from burned bone, and its chemistry still gives their fakes away.
To help pay for the Civil War, Congress in 1861 authorized the Treasury to issue Demand Notes, and people nicknamed them greenbacks for the green ink on their backs. Why green? The Bureau of Engraving and Printing says no definite explanation can be given for the original choice. When smaller bills arrived in 1929, green was kept because the pigment was plentiful, resisted chemical and physical change, and was associated with the government's strong and stable credit. One more surprise: every U.S. note issued since 1861 is still valid at full face value.
6The biggest U.S. bill was never meant for shoppers
On the tile: $100,000 Note1934
The largest note the Bureau of Engraving and Printing has ever produced is the $100,000 gold certificate of Series 1934, with a portrait of Woodrow Wilson. A total of 42,000 were printed between December 1934 and January 1935. They went only to Federal Reserve Banks, against an equal amount of gold held by the Treasury, and were used for transactions between those banks. The public never handled them. Most were later destroyed, and owning one privately is illegal, so the few survivors sit in places such as the Smithsonian and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
After World War II, Hungary suffered the worst hyperinflation ever recorded, and its notes grew ever larger. On June 3, 1946, it printed a note for 100 quintillion pengő, a one followed by 20 zeros. Guinness World Records lists it as the highest denomination banknote ever issued. An even bigger note, for one sextillion pengő, was printed but never issued. The 100 quintillion note was withdrawn on July 31, and Hungary switched to a new currency, the forint. The exchange rate said it all: one forint for 400 octillion pengő, a four followed by 29 zeros.
Australia's first decimal banknotes arrived in February 1966 with a watermark, a metal thread and sophisticated printing, yet by the end of that year the $10 note had been counterfeited. The Reserve Bank turned to the national science agency, CSIRO, for a long-term solution. The answer was a banknote printed on plastic polymer instead of paper. A commemorative $10 polymer note, issued in January 1988 for Australia's bicentenary, was a world first. Between 1992 and 1996 polymer notes replaced all of Australia's paper ones, and a growing number of countries have followed.
9When German towns made money from silk and porcelain
On the tile: Notgeld1914 to 1923
When World War I broke out, Germans hoarded coins and metal went to the war effort. Towns and companies filled the gap with emergency money called notgeld. It was not legal tender, but people accepted it locally. Issuers got creative with materials: silk, cloth, porcelain, foil, celluloid and even gelatin. The colorful notes became such collector favorites that issuers printed extra sets just for them. Then came the hyperinflation of the early 1920s, when a single egg could cost 2 billion marks, and notgeld appeared in denominations of millions and billions.
On February 27, 1472, the Republic of Siena created a Monte Pio, a public pawn office, to make charitable loans to poor or needy people at 7.5 percent interest. Monte, meaning heap, referred to a pool of money gathered for a good cause. In 1624 a second Monte was founded to lend to farmers and herders, and Grand Duke Ferdinand II of Tuscany guaranteed its deposits with income from state pasture lands in the Maremma, the paschi in its name. The two merged in 1784. Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena still operates and calls itself the oldest bank in the world.
Early Italian moneylenders did business at a table or bench, the banca, which gave English the word bank. Bankrupt arrived in English in the 1560s from the Italian banca rotta, literally a broken bench. The story goes that when a moneylender could not pay his debts, his bench was smashed so everyone would know he was finished. It is a vivid picture, but word historians doubt it was ever a real custom. The broken bench was most likely a figure of speech, much as we might say a failed business went belly up.
The Bank of England, more than 300 years old, is still nicknamed the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. The name comes from a 1797 cartoon by James Gillray. It shows Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger appearing to woo an elderly lady who stands for the bank, while really reaching for the gold coins in her pocket. She sits firmly on a money chest representing the bank's reserves, wearing a gown made of the new one-pound and two-pound notes issued to replace gold coins. The joke was about government borrowing, and the name stuck.
Over a weekend in 1798, thieves took $162,821 from the Bank of Pennsylvania, then housed in Philadelphia's Carpenters' Hall. Suspicion fell on Patrick Lyon, a blacksmith who had recently worked on the vault doors, and though innocent he spent about three months in Walnut Street Prison. The real culprit, Isaac Davis, gave himself away by depositing the stolen money in the very bank he had robbed. Lyon later sued and won. The artist John Neagle painted him at his forge, with the prison's cupola in the background.
A famous tale says Nathan Rothschild was first in London to learn of Wellington's victory at Waterloo in 1815, perhaps by carrier pigeon, and made a killing on the Stock Exchange. The Rothschild Archive finds no evidence for it. The tale owes most to an 1846 Paris pamphlet attacking the family, signed only Satan, and spread partly through antisemitism. Newspapers of the time suggest a traveler known as Mr C of Dover reached London first and shared the news openly. Rothschild probably did profit that week, but far less than many other investors, and there was no trickery.
Maggie Lena Walker was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1864, taught school, and rose to lead the Independent Order of St. Luke, an African American mutual aid society. In 1903 she founded the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank and became its first president, the first African American woman to charter a bank in the United States. The bank employed mostly Black women and made many home loans to Black families. It later merged into Consolidated Bank and Trust, which into the 21st century was still the oldest continually African American-operated bank in the country.
Amadeo Peter Giannini opened the Bank of Italy in 1904 in a former San Francisco saloon, to serve small customers other bankers ignored. When the great earthquake struck on April 18, 1906, and fires spread toward the bank, he loaded its money and ledgers onto two wagons, piled crates of oranges on top to fool looters, and took everything home. Though the governor had declared a banking holiday, he set up a desk on the Washington Wharf with a sack of gold coins on it. His bank later became Bank of America.
In November 1910, six men slipped away to the Jekyll Island Club off the coast of Georgia, claiming to go duck hunting. Senator Nelson Aldrich had them board his private rail car one at a time, and they used only first names so the staff would not know who they were. For more than a week they drafted a plan to reform American banking. When journalist B.C. Forbes revealed the trip in 1916, few paid attention. Yet their plan laid a foundation for the Federal Reserve Act, signed in December 1913.
The story goes that Frank McNamara ran short of cash after taking a colleague to dinner, had to wait while his wife drove over with money, and dreamed up a card for charging meals anywhere. That tale helped publicize Diners Club, launched around 1950. But the company's publicist, Matty Simmons, later wrote that he had to glamorize the card's creation, and he invented the dinner story. The real start was plainer: McNamara and his partner Ralph Schneider already had the idea and recruited Simmons to persuade restaurants to accept it.
On the Pacific island of Yap, the grandest money was stone: carved wheels called fei, quarried on Palau and brought home by canoe and raft, some as much as 12 feet across. A big stone usually stayed put when it changed hands. The anthropologist William Furness told of a family whose fortune was a giant fei lost generations earlier, when a storm forced its crew to cut the raft adrift. They all vouched for its size and quality, so it still counted as the family's wealth, though it lay under a few hundred feet of water offshore.
Sweden had Europe's greatest copper mines and too little silver, so in the 1640s it began issuing copper plate money: flat slabs stamped at the corners with the ruler's name and in the center with the value. The giant 10 daler plate weighed more than 40 pounds. They were so cumbersome that one account of a Stockholm bank robbery says the thieves took everything except the plates, which were not worth the effort. The 10 daler plate was dropped as impractical in 1648, and of the 26,774 made, only eight survive. Smaller plates stayed in use for more than a century.
3Soldiers in New France were paid in playing cards
On the tile: Card Money1685
In 1685 the colony of New France ran short of coins, and its finance chief, Intendant Jacques de Meulles, had troops to pay. His answer was playing cards. Cards then were stiff, plentiful and blank on the back, perfect for writing a value and adding official signatures. The suit did not matter; a jack of hearts was worth no more than a three of spades. Meant as a one-time fix, card money stayed in use for decades because coins kept running short. Oddly, not one genuine example of this playing card money has ever been found.
For centuries England's Exchequer recorded government income on tally sticks, pieces of wood whose notches showed how much someone had paid or owed. After tallies were abolished in 1826, about two cartloads of old sticks remained. On October 16, 1834, workmen fed them into the furnaces beneath the House of Lords. Smoke and heat were noticed that afternoon but ignored, and by evening the Palace of Westminster was ablaze. Most of it was destroyed. Prime Minister Lord Melbourne called the disaster "one of the greatest instances of stupidity upon record."
At the Westin St. Francis on San Francisco's Union Square, laundering money became a perfectly legal hotel tradition. Beginning in the 1930s, the coins the hotel took in were washed before going back out as change. The custom began when hotelier Dan London noticed that coins were soiling women's white gloves. Arnold Batliner washed the hotel's coins for 31 years. His successor, Rob Holsen, told a reporter in 2010 that about $1.5 million in change had passed through his hands in 20 years, tumbled clean with soap, water and birdshot.
In colonial Virginia, tobacco worked as money. Taxes, fees and salaries were normally paid in it, and people traded tobacco notes, receipts for leaf that had been inspected, weighed and packed. From 1696 each Anglican clergyman was paid 16,000 pounds of tobacco a year. When drought and bad weather ruined crops and tripled tobacco prices, laws in 1755 and 1758 let debts be paid in cash at two pence per pound instead. Clergymen sued for their lost pay, and the dispute, known as the Parsons' Cause, set a precedent for rebellion in the years before the American Revolution.
Wampum is often described simply as Native American money. To the nations who made it, beads of white whelk and purple quahog shell meant far more. Strung or woven into belts, wampum confirmed the truth of a message, and a treaty called for a great deal of it. Colonists short of coins treated it as cash anyway. In 1637 Massachusetts valued it at six beads a penny for small payments, and by 1640 purple beads counted double. Poor shells and dyed fakes eroded its value, and by 1661 it was no longer legal tender.
A popular story says the dollar sign began as the letters U and S laid on top of each other, for United States. Britannica says that claim has no factual basis. The symbol's origin is still debated, but the explanation the Bureau of Engraving and Printing calls most widely accepted is that it grew out of handwritten abbreviations for the Spanish peso, a P and an S that gradually merged. A 1778 invoice by the Revolutionary financier Oliver Pollock shows just such a mark. The earliest known printed dollar sign dates from 1797.
A widely repeated story says piggy banks are named after pygg, an orange clay once used for jars that held spare coins. Word experts say there is no record of any clay called pygg. The grain of truth is that in Scotland and northern England, from the 1400s, pig was a word for an earthenware pot or jar, and a Scots money box was called a pirlie pig, named for the pottery rather than any animal shape. An Oregon newspaper advertised The Pig Bank in 1900, and the name piggy bank was popular from about 1940.