Transcript - Izzit.org

MAN: What a great idea! Why don’t we…hold on…I thought of a snag…
WOMAN: What
MAN: Suppose one of these is worth a dozen eggs.
WOMAN: Then you simply swap it for a dozen eggs.
MAN: But suppose you only want half a dozen eggs
WOMAN: Oh, I see what you mean… can’t break it into smaller pieces. I’ve got it, that’s it!
MAN: What
WOMAN: Gold! We could use gold! Nobody ever has enough of it. You could swap a very small
amount of it for an awful lot of meat, or eggs or cloth. It keeps forever, it doesn’t even rust, and you can
divide it up really small!
MAN: Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!
WOMAN: So, that’s what we persuaded everybody who used the market to try out. Every family got all
the gold it could spare and took it round to Mr. Smith. Then he melted it down, and made it into small
round pieces for them. Some were bigger than others, and some were small enough to carry in your
pocket or your purse…see
MAN: Oh, shiny, aren’t they Then, of course, shopping in the market place became so much simpler.
If you couldn’t do a straight exchange, say a new shirt for Mr. Cowherd’s butter because Mr. Cowherd
didn’t need a new shirt, you could give him some of your gold in exchange tokens for the butter instead,
and he would use them to buy the salmon he did want.
WOMAN: And the nice thing was that in the end, the person who did want your shirt would arrive with
exchange tokens, swap them for the shirt, and you would be back where you started- with the same
number of exchange tokens you started with, and with the butter you wanted instead of the eggs you
didn’t want.
MAN: In history, all sorts of objects have been used for money and still are: iron rings, shells, even
tobacco- though precious metals have been the most popular, because they can be easily divided into
smaller pieces, and because they don’t corrode or rust.
WOMAN: Eventually, less-precious metals, such as copper and bronze, were to take the place of gold
and silver.
MAN: However, there used to be a problem, because any metal could be debased by mixing it with a
cheaper metal. To stop that- they used to test the purity of the metal, and then stamp it with a special
mark - an animal, or the head of the king or queen to authenticate it.
WOMAN: …also people used to clip small pieces off the edges of their coins.
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