$1, dropped into every era of human history. Let's see how far it gets.
Money hasn't been invented yet. Here's a rock. It has, for now, exactly as much purchasing power as a dollar.
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Money wasn't always metal discs and paper rectangles. Here's the actual, real history of how "money" became a thing at all.
For most of human history there was no money at all. If you wanted something, you traded something else for it directly — a chicken for a bag of grain, a favor for a favor. Worked fine, until you needed grain and the only guy with grain wanted a boat.
Eventually people needed something everyone agreed had value. Early societies used cattle, cowrie shells, salt (Roman soldiers were literally paid in it — that's where "salary" comes from), and on the island of Yap, enormous stone discs too heavy to move. Ownership just changed by reputation. The rock stayed exactly where it was.
The Kingdom of Lydia, in what's now Turkey, is credited with minting the first standardized metal coins, made of electrum — a natural gold-silver alloy. For the first time, a piece of money had a guaranteed, stamped value instead of "trust me, this cow is worth something."
Tang Dynasty China introduced paper currency, backed by real reserves of coins that merchants got tired of hauling around. It caught on so well that by the Song Dynasty, paper money was the standard — nearly a thousand years before Europe caught up.
By the time coinage and paper currency had spread globally through trade and colonization, "cash" — metal for small amounts, paper for larger ones — became the standard nearly everywhere. It took thousands of years of chickens, shells, and giant rocks to get here.
From here on, prices change fast enough to track year by year: U.S. average gas price, the federal minimum wage, and a first-class postage stamp. Real historical U.S. averages, rounded for sanity — not exact to the penny.
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