Katie Thornton

makes money off of making money and how it makes even more if you collect.

Jesse Kraft is an assistant curator at the American Numismatic Society, not the American Numismatic Association, which put on the coin show a different numismatic group.

And he focuses on American coins.

Soon, coins from all over the world made their way into the colonies.

English shillings, Portuguese joes, German tollers.

It was chaotic.

It's not like the exchange rate for these things was one-to-one.

And if that sounds impractical, well, it often was.

Imagine trying to buy a herd of sheep only to find that the precious silver coin you'd had in your satchel this whole time was too worn down to pay for it all.

Complicating things further, there were never enough of these random worn down coins making their way into the colonies for everyone to use in the first place.

So the colonists also had to use something else as money.

Eventually, though, people got tired of buying their cows with a combination of random European denominations plus a bunch of bulky, loose grain.

So after the United States won its independence, its leaders finally decided that we might want to make our own standardized monetary system.

Jefferson basically says, hey, British money is confusing.

A pence is one two hundred fortieth of a pound.

A farthing is one nine hundred sixtieth.

Spanish money, though, it uses easy, common sense fractions, halves, quarters.

That's what we should do.

Just like their Spanish predecessors, dollar coins were made of silver.

And early on, the mint made gold coins, too.