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SPEAKER_05: And yet, despite the risk, there were some really good reasons to try it.
SPEAKER_06: This is Jacob Goldstein, the author of Money, the true story of a made up thing. Hey, Jacob. Hi, Roman. So let's talk about the euro. Specifically, we're going to talk about the design of the paper money. But let's start with the idea of the euro itself.
SPEAKER_05: You can start that story with the fall of the Berlin Wall. How do you measure such an astonishing moment in history?
SPEAKER_01: The East German government said tonight they were going to make more openings in the wall, at least a dozen more. Put bulldozers right through the wall so that more people could cross to the West.
SPEAKER_05: East Germany and West Germany had been separate countries since the end of World War II. And in 1990, Germany was about to become one country again, which was in many ways a joyous moment. You know, the fall of this repressive regime in East Germany, the reunification of families and communities.
SPEAKER_06: But in the post-war era, West Germany had become an economic powerhouse. And Europeans were afraid that a united Germany might be a little too strong, which, you know, they had some really grounded historical reasons to be worried about this kind of thing.
SPEAKER_05: So the president of France, Francois Mitterrand, came up with a plan. He proposed this deal with the German chancellor. He said, we will support a reunified Germany if you, Germany, agree to give up your national currency and join with your neighbors in this new shared money. Basically, he wanted to put Germany in this big European bear hug. And Germany said yes. Because who doesn't love a bear hug? Sure, especially a European bear hug.
SPEAKER_06: And creating the euro involved all kinds of decisions, like how do you replace all the money in the ATM machines? And what is the exchange rate between the old currencies and the new one? And there was this one seemingly small question that took up a lot of attention.
SPEAKER_05: What was the new money going to look like? That's my favorite dilemma. It's a very new question. It's a very hard question. Because paper money had been this kind of nationalistic thing, a place where a country would put pictures of their heroes and their landmarks. But the point of the euro was to transcend nationalism, to build this single unified Europe. So if you put, say, the Reichstag on the 100 euro note and the Eiffel Tower on the 50, the French would be like, how come the Germans got the 100 and we only got the 50? And then the Dutch would be like, at least you got the 50. We didn't get anything on any bill.
SPEAKER_06: So when the architects of the euro announced a contest to design the new banknotes, they added a rule. No national heroes or national symbols or national landmarks, which doesn't leave a lot of options.
SPEAKER_05: Still, designers from 14 different European central banks submitted ideas. And on December 13, 1996, the head of the European Monetary Institute had a press conference to announce the winner. We wanted first to inform the heads of state and government about this choice,
SPEAKER_04: because this choice is clearly of a major symbolic significance.
SPEAKER_05: The winner, he said, was an Austrian banknote designer named Robert Kalina. In the Kalina designs, there was no Eiffel Tower, no famous author or general or queen. Instead, Kalina chose the most inoffensive symbols imaginable.
SPEAKER_04: The design emphasizes three main architectural elements, windows, gateways and bridges.
SPEAKER_05: The metaphors write themselves, you know, openness, connection, exactly what you want at this moment when a big chunk of Europe was joining together to use a single kind of money for the first time since the Roman Empire. And for the metaphors to work, they had to make sure these inoffensive symbols didn't represent a particular country. So the pictures on the bills weren't actual windows and gateways and bridges. They were pretend bridges, imaginary gateways. The images on the paper money were supposed to exude European-ness, but not Spanish-ness or French-ness or German-ness.
SPEAKER_06: Everything went fine with the windows and gateways. The problem was the bridges.
SPEAKER_05: The person who figured out that the problem was the bridges was a bridge-loving British journalist named Russ Swann. He was the editor of a magazine called Bridge Design and Engineering. I talked to him recently and he told me that, of course, he was delighted to learn that pretend bridges were going to feature prominently on Europe's new money. We are the bridge people and they're using our thing for their thing and, you know, that's excellent.
SPEAKER_05: So Russ figured he would do a little story for his magazine about the paper money. He requested a press pack with pictures of the bills. This was the mid-90s, you know, the web was just getting going. And the euro people sent him pictures. The bridges on the bills go in chronological order. So the oldest bridges are on the smallest bills. It's like this little tour through architectural history. And as Russ is looking at these pictures, the first thing that catches his eye is the 500 euro note, which is the biggest bill and the most modern bridge. The 500 euro has a cable-stayed bridge.
SPEAKER_06: It's a modern-style bridge where there are these straight cables holding up most of the structure. It's graphically very striking and lovely. Again, this is supposed to be a generic example of a bridge, not a real landmark. But Russ noticed something wrong with this supposedly fake bridge.
SPEAKER_08: It looked like a bridge I'd been to visit, oh, six, seven weeks earlier. In northern France, it's called the Pont de Normandy, the Normandy Bridge. And I thought, you know what, I think that's the Normandy. I think that's not the fictitious structure that the European Union have said it was. So there are a lot of cable-stayed bridges and they all kind of look like this.
SPEAKER_06: But underneath the bridge at the signs are these pillars. And there's this one spot where you'd expect to see a pillar, but there is no pillar. And that's true for the Pont de Normandy. And it's also true for this design.
SPEAKER_05: Russ calls up the designer of the bridge, who he'd talked to for the magazine, and he winds up faxing him a picture of this 500 euro bill. And he came back to me within moments and said, this is my bridge.
SPEAKER_08: This is absolutely, positively the bridge that I designed, the bridge that you and I stood on six weeks ago in northern France. I will stand up in a court of law and swear on anything you like that this is my bridge because there are these features that are specific to this bridge. Now, of course, this made me think, I found one. I wonder if I can find some more. If you are the editor of Bridge Design and Engineering, this is your moment.
SPEAKER_06: So over the next couple days, Russ looked through books and old photographs trying to identify these supposedly fake bridges on the other Euronotes.
SPEAKER_05: And right away, he saw this picture of the Rialto. It's the famous and really very beautiful bridge in the middle of Venice.
SPEAKER_08: There's an arch below. There's a parade of shops going up one side at an angle of maybe 30 degrees and down the other side at 30 degrees. So when you look at the bridge, your eye is drawn to the superstructure, to the stuff on top of the bridge, which is the walkways and the shops and so forth. Russ thought the masonry of the Rialto Bridge looked awfully familiar, so he mentally removed the walkways and the shops and all the other stuff on top of the bridge itself.
SPEAKER_08: I realized that that was exactly what the banknote designer had done. It just stripped off the top and basically did a cut and paste job onto his 50 euro banknote design.
SPEAKER_05: So now Russ had two. The 500 is the Pont de Normandy, the 50 is the Rialto in Venice, but with the buildings removed from the top. And over the next few days, he figured out a few more. The 100 euro note was the Pont de Nuely, a rail and road bridge in Paris. The 10 euro note is a Roman aqueduct in Segovia. And finally, there was the image on the five euro note, the smallest bill, the oldest bridge.
SPEAKER_08: It was a boat bridge, so it's not really a structure in its own right. It's a series of boats with planks across them, a very ancient way of crossing a river.
SPEAKER_06: This is one of my favorite choices. It's this lovely old proto bridge, more than a bridge itself. It's just a would-be bridge.
SPEAKER_05: Clever, right? Really clever in a really low-tech way. So a few days into his quest, Russ found an engraving that matched the picture on that five euro note.
SPEAKER_08: And it was an engraving of an ancient structure in India.
SPEAKER_06: So it wasn't even a European bridge.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, the bonus points, right? It's both not not real and it's not in Europe. So now Russ had all these different bridges he'd identified. He tried to call the banknote designer, Kalina, but couldn't reach him. And he decided it was time to tell the world that these fake bridges were were not fake. They were fake fake bridges.
SPEAKER_08: So I wrote up the story for the magazine. The magazine was about to go to press. He pitched the story to the BBC's main TV news show and they wanted to do it.
SPEAKER_05: So they asked me to come down to London and appear on the show that night, which was which is all very exciting.
SPEAKER_08: Who doesn't want to be on TV? And Russ Swan, the man who'll send the designs of the European banknotes back to the drawing board.
SPEAKER_00: We hope you're so with us now. Now, this was the first one. This is the one that you spotted, first of all.
SPEAKER_08: Indeed. This is the Ponder Normandie, which is a very well-known bridge opened only two years ago in France. The next day, my phone was ringing off the hook. I got page one lead in the Wall Street Journal. It was in newspapers in Finland, in Brazil. I was briefly almost famous and enjoyed every every moment of it. It was quite fun. It was fun for Russ Swan, but I can't imagine it was fun for Robert Kalina, who designed the bells.
SPEAKER_05: Kalina seemed to take it OK. He basically said in interviews, I thought the bridges were generic enough, but apparently not. Kalina had to start all over again. His job was to turn the fake fake bridges into real fake bridges.
SPEAKER_06: Kalina and the Europeans, they actually consulted with engineers to make sure that they were plausible fake bridges.
SPEAKER_06: And in fact, the bills wound up changing a lot.
SPEAKER_05: Like if we look at the before and after of that 500 euro note, you can see on the old 500 note, there was the missing pillar. That was the dead giveaway that it was a real bridge. The new version has that pillar and it really looks like a fake bridge. And then maybe most interesting on the five euro note, Kalina got rid of that boat bridge altogether and replaced it with a apparently generic Roman aqueduct.
SPEAKER_06: They went through all the banknote designs. They fixed the money. But the question is, did the euro actually achieve its high minded ideals that it was trying to achieve? Like, did it really bring Europe together? At first it did. At first, everybody loved the euro. It really did feel like one Europe coming together in a common currency.
SPEAKER_05: But the new money ultimately couldn't paper over the economic differences between the different countries in Europe. And that really became clear after the financial crisis of 2008. Some countries like Germany recovered fairly quickly, but other countries like Spain and Greece did not.
SPEAKER_03: Tonight, a country deeply divided. All week, the banks closed, life savings locked up inside, endless lines at ATMs. And if Spain and Greece had still had their own money at that time, they could have printed more of it.
SPEAKER_05: They could have increased the supply of pesetas and drachmas to help their economies recover. But they'd given up that power when they joined the euro. So their economies just got worse and worse. They wound up limping along for years. And there is a good argument that the euro itself made them worse off. Yeah, like you could make a generic European bridge for a generic European currency, but you can't make an actually generic Europe.
SPEAKER_06: It is many countries with lots of different issues and with lots of different economies.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, the dream of the euro was this kind of abstract theoretical idea of a connected Europe. But I think maybe, maybe they should have kept those original euro designs, the ones with the pictures of real bridges, to remind themselves that Europeans don't live in some abstract Europe with pretend bridges. They cross real bridges to real countries. But there's one more twist to this real bridge, fake bridge story.
SPEAKER_06: It comes in 2013 when a designer in the Netherlands convinced a town called Spakenisa to build tiny replicas of the fake bridges on the Euronauts. So let's recap. It started with the desire to have fake European bridges.
SPEAKER_05: And it was a very, very interesting and interesting experience. They ended up to be real fake European bridges, and then they made an effort to make them actually fake fake European bridges.
SPEAKER_06: And now those fake European bridges are real bridges that exist in a little town outside of Rotterdam. But they're like so small, they seem like like miniature golf course bridges. So even though they're real, they seem kind of fake.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, they seem like they're fake. Yeah, they're even the colors of the Euronauts, so they're not even pretending to be real.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, the fakest real bridges ever. More Money Talk with Jacob Goldstein after this.
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SPEAKER_05: And the origin of paper money is a really interesting story that, to be honest, I didn't know before I was working on the book. I'd been covering money for years, but the origin of paper money was new to me. And so that story takes place in China around the year 1000 A.D. It happens in the province of Sichuan. And at that time in Sichuan, they were using iron coins for money. And iron is a bad thing to use for money because it's not worth very much. It's heavy. So like you needed a pound and a half of iron coins to buy a pound of salt. Right. It's like you have to go grocery shopping with pennies or something. It's just bad. It's just bad kind of money. And so this merchant in Sichuan at some point starts saying to people, look, you leave your terrible iron money with me and I'll give you a receipt, like a claim check. Roman left a thousand iron coins at my shop and you can probably see what's going to happen.
SPEAKER_06: Then all of a sudden these actual like bank notes that are notes from banks saying how much money you have, become the thing that people trade.
SPEAKER_05: Exactly. Exactly. They turn into money. And in fact, for a really long time, until the 20th century, paper money will be a claim check for metal, right? More often silver or gold. But this idea that what paper money is, is a receipt and that the thing that it is representing is silver or gold, persists for a really long time. And in China, you know, it starts with these private merchants, but then the government gets involved. They see that it's working well. The government takes over the business of printing paper money. And there is this real flourishing in China around this time, connected to and driven in part by the paper money. You see more trade and you see science and you see urbanization enabled in part by the increased trade. You know, like there's like this whole restaurant scene springs up and you have cities of a million people in China, which is like 10x the size of European cities at that time. And this persists for hundreds of years. Eventually, they actually try money not backed by metal. Kubelei Khan is running China. He says, yeah, there's still going to be paper money, but you actually cannot trade in your paper for metal, for bronze. It was bronze coins at that time. And it worked like they had fiat money in China, you know, hundreds of years before there was any paper money at all in the West. Really remarkable. Yeah. So what happened?
SPEAKER_06: Let me tell you, there is a rebellion and the rebellion forces the Khans out of China.
SPEAKER_05: And there is this new dynasty, the Ming dynasty that is basically reactionary. You would say today they don't like this paper money and all of this trade and all these cities like the ideal for the Ming dynasty rulers is the self-sufficient agricultural village. And they actually wind up getting rid of paper money. This real breakthrough that, you know, helped people live better material lives disappears. And so for a while, there is no paper money anywhere in the world anymore. There's a few hundred years where paper money is just gone from the face of the earth and then it appears in Europe a few hundred years later. And in fact, after they get rid of paper money in China, China gets poorer. You know, they'd had this economic flourishing and then they get rid of it and they become worse off.
SPEAKER_07: Wow. You know, there's all kinds of stories and science fiction stories about lost technologies that people then rediscover.
SPEAKER_06: And it's the secret to having a great and bright future is this technology from old that's been rediscovered. But there was this one and it was paper money and we just didn't have it out of choice for a long time. That's a really nice read of it.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, like in, you know, 1500, humanity had this amazing lost technology, right? Paper money. It had sort of helped this giant society flourish for hundreds of years and then vanished from the earth.
SPEAKER_06: Well, I love that story. I love the whole book. Thank you so much for being here, Jacob.
SPEAKER_05: Oh, thanks for having me, Roman.
SPEAKER_06: Jacob Goldstein's book is called Money, the true story of a made up thing. It's fantastic. 99% invisible was produced this week by Jacob Goldstein, edited by Chris Berube, mixed in tech production by Dara Hirsch, music by our director of sound Sean Real. Delaney Hall is the executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Vivian Lay, Emmett Fitzgerald, Lasha Madone, Christopher Johnson, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker and me, Roman Mars. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI.org or on Instagram and Reddit, too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org. Stitcher, Stitcher, Stitcher, Stitcher, Stitcher, Sirius XM podcasts. Great sleep can be hard to come by these days, and finding the right mattress feels totally overwhelming. Serta's new and improved Perfect Sleeper is a simple solution designed to support all sleep positions. With zoned comfort, memory foam and a cool to the touch cover, the Serta Perfect Sleeper means more restful nights and more rested days. Find your comfort at Serta.com.
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