Large bills: America's No-Longer-Current Currency

The $500 bill: in circulation until 1969, but still legal tender!

Currently, the highest denominated piece of American currency that’s in circulation is the $100 bill. The bill has gone through a couple of design changes in recent years, but it still has Benjamin Franklin on the front, and Independence Hall on the back. This is as high as American currency has gone since 1969. Before then, the United States used to issue larger bills.

The next highest denomination was the $500 bill, which featured President William McKinley’s portrait on the front. (No bills over $100 had pictures on the back—just stylized printings of the denominations written out in words, festooned with curlicues and the like, like you see below. Older bills of this size that predate the 1930s often did have pictures on the backs.) These higher denominated bills were as follows:

$500 – Pres. William McKinley

$1000 – Pres. Grover Cleveland

$5000 – Pres. James Madison

$10,000 – Sec. of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase

$100,000 – Pres. Woodrow Wilson

These bills were more useful in the past because physical cash transactions were a lot more common in the past than they are today. A lot of people didn’t trust banks following the Crash of 1929, and they felt better having something they could hold in their hands. Since the US government recalled all gold coins in 1933, large bills were the next best thing. Of course, people who horded cash in mattresses seldom had such large bills. Large bills were used more for business transactions, or by people who had a lot of money to their name to begin with. (My grandparents, who were not rich but were spooked by the Great Depression all the same, didn’t stash cash in a mattress, but they did so in the lining of an old coat they kept hidden in the attic. “Stashing money in a mattress” is an expression that’s a bit obsolete these days, and didn’t necessarily mean your cash was actually hidden in a mattress.)

By 1969, the culture had changed to the point where businesses mostly did high-value transactions by check rather than by cash, so demand for larger bills had dropped off. Plus the feeling was that organized crime had an easier time moving large amounts of money around anonymously if they could use cash, and the government wanted to discourage that. The last large bills over $100 were printed in 1944, so by 1969, the supplies of these bills in good enough shape to circulate were low enough that the government just decided to recall them all. Any bill over $100 that are deposited to a bank is turned over to the Treasury Department. It’s not illegal to own or spend these bills, and a number of them are still in private hands. They’re held by collectors these days, and seldom (if ever) spent anymore.

The $100,000 bill is illegal for private citizens to own, and always has been. These bills were only ever used for internal business between the different Federal Reserve Banks, and even they don’t use them anymore.

The now-obsolete $5,000 bill.

The $100,000 bill: legal, but not tender!

How the Lemon was Invented

Lemons How do you make a lemon? Silly question, isn’t it? You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right? That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy. Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow. You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true. The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma. (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar . I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.) The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years. The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits. One fruit is the bitter orange, best known in the west for

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”. It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice. Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes. I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult? Yes… and no. The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult. It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser . Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word. One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game would have to hose down the rink in or

The Whoopie Cap

What can you do with your father’s old hats? If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.” Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right. Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s. In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats? The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style. Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice. But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too. When that happened, you’d just throw it away. Though if there were

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