By the mid-18th century, the lion dollar had been replaced by Spanish dollar, the famous "pieces of eight", which were distributed widely in the Spanish colonies in the New World and in the Philippines. ===Origins of the dollar sign=== The sign is first attested in business correspondence in the 1770s as a scribal abbreviation "ps", referring to the Spanish American peso, that is, the "Spanish dollar" as it was known in British North America.
See also for complete list of currencies. Sierra Leone: The Sierra Leonean dollar was used from 1791 to 1805.
Common in the Thirteen Colonies, Spanish dólar were even legal tender in one colony, Virginia. On April 2, 1792, U.S.
The US Mint continues to make silver $1-denomination coins, but these are not intended for general circulation. ==Relationship to the troy pound== The quantity of silver chosen in 1792 to correspond to one dollar, namely, 371.25 grains of pure silver, is very close to the geometric mean of one troy pound and one pennyweight.
Finally, in the United States, the ratio of the value of gold to the value of silver in the period from 1792 to 1873 averaged to about 15.5, being 15 from 1792 to 1834 and around 16 from 1834 to 1873.
The US government simply sampled all Spanish milled dollars in circulation in 1792 and arrived at the average weight in common use.
In the Sherlock Holmes story "The Man with the Twisted Lip" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1891, an Englishman posing as a London beggar describes the shillings and pounds he collected as dollars. In 1804, a British five-shilling piece, or crown, was sometimes called "dollar".
See also for complete list of currencies. Sierra Leone: The Sierra Leonean dollar was used from 1791 to 1805.
They remained in use until 1811.
Finally, in the United States, the ratio of the value of gold to the value of silver in the period from 1792 to 1873 averaged to about 15.5, being 15 from 1792 to 1834 and around 16 from 1834 to 1873.
Additionally, all lesser-denomination coins were defined as percentages of the dollar coin, such that a half-dollar was to contain half as much silver as a dollar, quarter-dollars would contain one-fourth as much, and so on. In an act passed in January 1837, the dollar's alloy (amount of non-silver metal present) was set at 15%.
On February 21, 1853, the quantity of silver in the lesser coins was reduced, with the effect that their denominations no longer represented their silver content relative to dollar coins. Various acts have subsequently been passed affecting the amount and type of metal in U.S.
As a result of the decision of the German Empire to stop minting silver thaler coins in 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, the worldwide price of silver began to fall.
Finally, in the United States, the ratio of the value of gold to the value of silver in the period from 1792 to 1873 averaged to about 15.5, being 15 from 1792 to 1834 and around 16 from 1834 to 1873.
Silver dollars reaching China (whether Spanish, trade, or other) were often stamped with Chinese characters known as "chop marks", which indicated that that particular coin had been assayed by a well-known merchant and deemed genuine. ===Other national currencies called "dollar"=== Prior to 1873, the silver dollar circulated in many parts of the world, with a value in relation to the British gold sovereign of roughly $1 = 4s 2d (21p approx).
In the Sherlock Holmes story "The Man with the Twisted Lip" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1891, an Englishman posing as a London beggar describes the shillings and pounds he collected as dollars. In 1804, a British five-shilling piece, or crown, was sometimes called "dollar".
By 1900, value of silver dollars had fallen to 50 percent of gold dollars.
The Straits dollar adopted a gold exchange standard in 1906 after it had been forced to rise in value against other silver dollars in the region.
Following the abandonment of the gold standard by Canada in 1931, the Canadian dollar began to drift away from parity with the U.S.
Hence, by 1935, when China and Hong Kong came off the silver standard, the Straits dollar was worth 2s 4d (11.5p approx) sterling, whereas the Hong Kong dollar was worth only 1s 3d sterling (6p approx). The term "dollar" has also been adopted by other countries for currencies which do not share a common history with other dollars.
It returned to parity a few times, but since the end of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates that was agreed to in 1944, the Canadian dollar has been floating against the U.S.
coinage by 1965 and the dollar became a free-floating fiat currency without a commodity backing defined in terms of real gold or silver.
All text is taken from Wikipedia. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License .
Page generated on 2021-08-05