22 March, 2007

New twenty pound note

Well, looks like we have a new design for the twenty pound note! Front -
New 20 pound note - front
- and back -
New 20 pound note - back
- gave me quite a shock when it popped out of the cash dispenser, thought I was being fobbed off with Scottish currency until I looked a bit closer...the Queen (God Bless Her) is on the front (as usual) but on the back they have dumped poor old Elgar, it's now some chap called "Adam Smith (1723-1790)" accompainied by the text "The Division of labour in pin manufacturing:(and the great increase in the quantity of work that results)"...turns out he is a Scottish philosopher, the quote refers to his work "Wealth of Nations" where he famously managed to work out that where one man could make one pin in a day, if you carefully divided up the 18 steps required to make a pin between 10 people, the result is that collectively they can make more like 48,000 pins in a day...love to see the working out he did on that one! Bet the pin makers guild were venomously making effigies of him shortly thereafter also...talk about a price crash... ;)

Anyway, his mathematics aside, we now have a Scot depicted and the adoption of Scottish colours on a Bank of England banknote...not entirely sure I approve, couldn't we have found an English philospher that contributed to economics..?

4 comments:

kipperfrog said...

that looks so wierd!

Snowbabies said...

They do look a bit funny, we got a shock at the cash machine the other day, thought it was Monopoly money at first lol.

Anonymous said...

An Englishman that's good with economics? Name one, this is your challenge :p

Unknown said...

Haha! Classic... ;)