How is money made?
The ways in which money has been made, and the materials used to
make it, are an important part of the history of money. Making
coins, paper money and plastic cards involves complex processes,
different in each case.
How coins are made
Coins have nearly always been made of metal
since their development in the seventh century
BC. Metal-working demands considerable skill and technology.
The metal has to be extracted from its natural state, often by
mining, and then turned into the required form.
Making metal into coins is also complicated,
both in design and production. Quality control and consistency are
vital. Each coin has to be the same as the next, so that people
accept that they are worth the same amount of money.
The two most important methods of coin
production are striking and casting. The Western tradition tended
to strike coins between engraved dies, while the Chinese and Far
Eastern tradition has, until the twentieth century, made coins by
casting them in moulds.
Machine-made coins
During the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were dramatic changes in
the ways money was made. New machines, including the
screw-press and the first steam-powered machinery for striking
coins, were introduced. To start with, however, these new methods
were slower and less accurate than traditional hand-striking, and
it took time to convince all mints to change over to
machine-striking coins. The new machines hugely increased the
numbers of coins which could be produced for circulation, to
satisfy the increasing worldwide demand for coinage.
How paper money is made
The manufacture of banknotes plays an
important role in allowing them to be used as money with
confidence. Early banknotes were
black and white, but
now almost all banknotes are brightly coloured, and feature
sophisticated designs which make them recognisable as national
currency as well as making them harder to counterfeit.
The threat of forgery is a constant problem,
despite severe penalties, and new developments like the polymer
banknotes pioneered by the Reserve Bank of Australia help to reduce
the number of forgeries in circulation.
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