February 15: UK currency

On this date in 1971 Britain changed to a decimal currency system from pounds, shillings and pence after 1,200 years. Here are ten things you might not know about UK currency.

1. The Pound is the oldest currency still in use today. It dates back to Anglo-Saxon England, around 700 AD, where 240 silver pennies weighed one pound. This is how the currency got its name, with a “pound sterling” literally being worth the same as a pound of sterling silver. Silver was the legal basis of the pound for hundreds of years. The symbol £ is used to denote the pound sterling. The symbol came from the Latin alphabet ‘L’ which stands for Libra - the Latin for pound.
2. The first pound coin appeared in 1489, under the reign of Henry VII. Pound notes started circulating in England shortly after the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, and were originally handwritten.
3. The ridges on the edges of coins are thanks to Isaac Newton, who spent 30 years as warden of the Royal Mint. He recalled all the plain-edged coins in circulation and re-issued them with milled edges to stop people shaving bits off to make new ones.
4. The so called copper coins are not made of Copper. Coins made after 1992 are made of steel and only plated with copper, so are magnetic. Older ones are made of bronze and aren't magnetic, so you can tell the older coins because you can pick them up with a magnet. The so called silver coins, however, are made of copper.
5. The 50p was the world's first seven-sided coin.
6. If asked to draw the Queen's face on a coin, 88% of people draw her facing left, even though she actually faces right on all coins. Some say this is because she faces left on stamps, or because most people are right handed and that's the easiest way to draw a face if you're right handed. What people may not know, as it's a long time since it last happened, is that each time the monarch changes, the new king or queen faces the opposite way on coins to the previous one.
7. In the Bank of England’s vaults, there are a small number of ‘giants’ and ‘titans’ – which is the nickname for £1 million and £100 million notes respectively. They never appear on the streets, but play a role in the financial system by backing the value of the notes issued by commercial banks in Scotland and Northern Ireland; according to the BBC, “for every pound an authorised Scottish or Northern Irish bank wants to print in the form of its own notes, it has to deposit the equivalent amount in sterling with the Bank of England.”
8. The reverse design of post-2008 coins can be combined to form an image of the Royal Shield. A competition to design the reverse of the coinage was held in 2005. The winner was Matthew Dent, who was awarded a prize of £35,000.
9. The Royal Mint estimates almost four billion pounds worth of coins are currently in circulation, made up of around 29 billion individual coins -- along with these estimates they also figure £300,000 worth of coins go missing every year.
10. Two 1p coins weigh the same as one 2p coin, and two 5p coins weigh the same as one 10p coin.

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