The Dollar Sign: A Spanish Peso Scribble That Conquered the Keyboard

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The dollar sign looks like the purest emblem of American capitalism, yet its origins have nothing to do with the United States. The popular story that it is a U laid over an S, promoted by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged, has no paper trail behind it. Historians point instead to merchants' ledgers, where the plural of the Spanish-American peso was abbreviated as a p with a superscript s. Written thousands of times a day with quill pens, the two letters slowly merged until only an S with a vertical stroke remained.

This episode follows the symbol from 18th century counting houses and the silver coins of Potosí to a Philadelphia type foundry and, finally, the computer keyboard. Along the way it weighs the coin imagery that reinforced the shape, discards several colorful myths, and shows how programmers repurposed a character that existed only because early business machines needed it for accounting.

A 1778 letter by Oliver Pollock, an Irish trader and financier of the American Revolution, shows a merged ps nearly identical to the modern sign.
Spanish pieces of eight showed the Pillars of Hercules wrapped in an S-shaped banner, and merchants in Qing dynasty China called them double pillar dollars.
The Coinage Act of 1792 modeled the U.S. dollar on the Spanish milled dollar, and foreign coins remained legal tender until 1857.
Philadelphia printer Archibald Binny cast the first metal type of the symbol in the 1790s, while the Portuguese cifrão used the same shape as a decimal separator.
In BASIC the sign marks a text string, in Excel it locks a cell reference, and in nuclear physics one dollar is the threshold of prompt criticality.

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