OCR Text |
Show THE DOLLAR. History of a Tom That Has Become Worldwide. Our word dollar dates back to ITS 5, when a resolution was passed by congress con-gress which provided that it should be the unit of money fcf the United States. Another resolution was passed in 17S5, August 5, providing- that it should weigh 375.64 graius of pure silver. sil-ver. The mint was established in 1792, and then required to coin silver dollars containing 371.25 grains of pure silver. This was due to the influence of Alex-, ander Hamilton. No dollars were coined until 1734, and then irregular. They are now worth ?100 each. In-1794 the coinage of regular dollars began. Our coin was the adaptation of the Spanish milled dollar, a coin very popular pop-ular wherever the Spaniards traveled. The coin was called "piastre," meaning a flat piece of metal; it is synonymous with piaster. It is supposed that the Spanish took the German "toiler" and called it by the name of "p. er." The word dollar is entered in Bailey's English Eng-lish Dictionary of 1745, and was used repeatedly by Shakespeare at the beginning be-ginning of the seventeenth century, especially es-pecially In Macbeth, II: 2, 62: "Till she disbursed 510,000 to our general use,'' and in "Tempest," II: 1, 17. The question ques-tion where Shakespeare found the word dollar is answered by the fact that the Hanseatic towns maintained a great establishment es-tablishment called the Steel Yard in London. The Steel Yard merchants were mostly North Germans who would call the German thaler as if it spelled "dah-Ier." The same merchants originated the word sterling, an abbreviation ab-breviation of the word "esterling." As the Hanseatic trade was particularly brisk on the Baltic and in Russia, tha standard coins of the Hanse merchants were called esterlings, and sterling came to mean something genuine and desirable. The world dollar is thg English for thaler, the first of which was coined about 1485, and corresponds quite closely to our present American silver dollars. The word thaler means "coming from a dale or valley;" the first dollar having been coined in a Bohemian Bo-hemian valley called Foachimisthal. It was under Charles V., the emperor ot Germany, King of Spain and Lord of Spanish America, that the German thaler tha-ler became the coin of the world. Golden Thoughts. . j |