Money, Money, Money

---

Was a reasonably nice day and after going for a walk I went to the Money Museum. It had a bit of history of money and how it evolved in Scotland and the world.
It showed some examples of early paper money and how enterprising It shows a bit about how coins are struck, some ways that people attempted, and succeeded in making forgeries. The beginning of mechanisation made forgery more difficult since all coins would be identical. However in 1920s Edinburgh, James Steele built his own punching and rolling machines. He struck half-crowns that even decieved the banks. His forged florins were so good that not one of his nearly 15,000 coins were ever suspected.

In the early 1800's when they started to charge people for Life Insurance they realized that things such as heavy drinking or intemprence would lead to a shorter life expectancey and as a result they charged a premium. While that is not surprising some of the reasons are more interesting. John Winterbottom applied for a 5000pound insurance and since he was "Lusty and lives rather freely" he was charged more. My favorite example was that of Reverend Thomas Hulton, in 1833 was penalised for being "Fast and short necked"!

---

Photos

Screw Copy Press
A photocopy machine dating from the 19th century, and used up until 1940. Good thing we got new machines or we could never get all the tax returns done!

Coin Sheet
Sheets are rolled out to the proper thickness and then blank coins are stamped out. This sheet would then be melted back down for another sheet.

Coin Rejector
Napier's Light Coin Rejector allowed banks to quickly and efficiently weed out 'light' (underweight) gold coins. The light coins would be ejected out of the slit in the front of the box. These included counterfeits, and over-worn genuine coin.

French Forgeries
During the Napoleonic Wars thousands of French soldiers were held at prison camps in Britain. These soldiers would carve mutton bones and use then to replicate seals and watermarks.
Bank officials commented on the 'foreign' appearance of the forged script.

Sovereign Scales
This brass sea-saw balance (1850) was used for weighing sovereigns and half sovereigns. The slots in the pans were used to check the coins' thickness.

James Steele
An Edinburgh Forger.

One Million Pounds
In this case there is one millino pounds All of the bills have been cancelled though so they are not actually worth anything anymore.