Photos and Facts About Money

For numismatic enthusiast, here are some treasure trivial and fact$ about money.

Zimbabwe $100 trillion note - the highest denomination in the world

To deal with hyperinflation that reached the ludicrous level of 231 million % and saw the price for a loaf of bread hit 300 billion Zimbabwean dollars, Zimbabwe's newly formed unity government — including bitter opponents President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai — issued a $100 trillion note in early January. (One hundred trillion, by the way, is a 1 with 14 zeroes — making the note the highest denomination in the world.)


Money life span

All bills eventually wear out. The smaller the value, the more often you use it — and the shorter its lifespan.


Elizabeth's Money

From Australia to Trinidad and Tobago, Queen Elizabeth II's portrait has graced the currencies of 33 different countries — more than that of any other individual or royalties.


An old million note

The largest banknote ever issued by the Bank of England was the £1,000,000 note, issued in 1948 as a temporary measure during the postwar reconstruction in the Marshall Plan.


Largest paper money

Measuring in at roughly the size of a sheet of legal paper, the world's largest single banknote is the 100,000-peso note created by the government of the Philippines in 1998. Designed to celebrate a century of independence from Spanish rule, the note was offered only to collectors, who could purchase one of the limited-edition notes for 180,000 pesos, or about $3,700.


First Paper Money

Paper bills were first used by the Chinese, who started carrying folding money during the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907) — mostly in the form of privately issued bills of credit or exchange notes — and used it for more than 500 years before the practice began to catch on in Europe in the 17th century. While it took another century or two for paper money to spread to the rest of the world, China was already going through a fairly advanced financial crisis: the production of paper notes had grown until their value plummeted, prompting inflation to soar. As a result, China eliminated paper money entirely in 1455 and wouldn't adopt it again for several hundred years.


The world's first ATM Machnne from Barclays Bank

It might just be the best idea to come to a man in the bathtub since Archimedes' time. While taking a soak, inventor John Shepherd-Barron devised what is hailed as the world's first automatic teller machine, although his claim to the title is a matter of dispute. He pitched the device to the British bank Barclays.


Dirty Money - money can reportedly carry more germs than a household toilet

All money, it turns out, could stand to be laundered: the stuff is filthy. Studies show that a solid majority of U.S. bills are contaminated by cocaine. Drug traffickers often use coke-sullied hands to move cash, and many users roll bills into sniffing straws; the brushes and rollers in ATMs may distribute the nose candy through the rest of the money supply.


Money Cops

Following the Civil War, counterfeit currency became such a rampant problem in the U.S. — more than a third of all bills were believed to be fakes — that the government was forced to act. In 1865, a special division of the Treasury Department was created to crack down on counterfeiting before it completely undermined the nation's economic system.


The Origins of $ Symbol

No one knows the origin of the dollar sign, but the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing has a pretty good guess. The government agency responsible for designing and printing all those crisp dollar bills says the design, originally used to denote Spanish and Mexican pesos, "P S ," came to be written such that the S was on top of the the P. The symbol was widely used before the 1875 issue of the first U.S. paper dollar. And in case you never noticed, it doesn't actually appear on U.S. currency at all.