99% Invisible - 458- Real Fake Bridges

Episode Date: September 15, 2021

The great Jacob Goldstein, author of Money: The True Story of a Made Up Thing, stops by to tell us two stories about the design of paper currency around the world. First, the story of the making of the Euro banknotes, the design of which was supposed to unify Europe and not rely on any one country's national heroes or monuments. Then we learn about China's early pioneering experiments in paper currency, hundreds of years before it caught on in the rest of the world. Real Fake Bridges

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the early 1990s, a block of European countries embarked on a pretty wild experiment. They decided to get rid of all their money and replace it with a single common currency. Today, the euro is something we take for granted, but 30 years ago, it was an extraordinary and risky idea. 12 different countries who spoke different languages with different cultures and economies, all using the same paper money. Nobody was

sure if it would work. And yet, despite the risk, there were some really good reasons to try. 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. Yet you can start that story with the fall of the Berlin Wall. How do you measure such an astonishing moment in history? 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. 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. 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.

So the president of France, a Francois mid-eraan, 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 bearhug. And Germany said, yes. Because who doesn't love a bearhug? Sure, especially a European bearhug. And Germany said yes. Because who doesn't love a bearhug? Sure, especially a European bearhug. And green in 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. What was the new money gonna look like? That's my favorite dilemma. 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-year-old 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. 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. 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 because

this is a choice clearly of a symbolic, major symbolic significance. The winner, he said, was an Austrian banknote designer named Robert Kalina. In the Kalina design, there was no Eiffel Tower, no famous author or general or queen. Instead, Kalina chose the most inoffensive symbols imaginable. The design emphasizes three main architectural elements, windows, gateways, and bridges. 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 Europeanness, but not Spanishness or Frenchness or Germanness. Everything went fine with the windows and gateways. The problem was the bridges. The person who figured out that the problem was the bridges was a bridge-loving British journalist named Russ Swan. 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. 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-year-old has a cable-stayed bridge. 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. It looked like a bridge I'd been to visit oh, six, seven weeks earlier. In northern France, it's called the Pond Normandy, the Normandy Bridge. And I thought, 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. But underneath the bridge at the sides 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 Pond and Ormeney.

And it's also true for this design. 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. This is, I recognize it. 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. 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. So over the next couple of days, Russ looked through books and old photographs, trying to identify the supposedly fake bridges on the other Euro notes. And right away, he saw this picture of the Realtto.

It's a famous and really very beautiful bridge in the middle of Venice. 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 of 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 mazenry 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. I realized that that was exactly what the bank and her designer had done. It just stripped off the top and basically did a cut and paste job onto his 50-year bank and her design. and drop onto his 50-year banknote design. 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 Nuali, 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. It was a boat bridge, so it's not really a structure that's unright, it's a series of boats with planks across them,

a very ancient way of crossing a river. 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. Clever, right? Really clever in a really kind of low tech way. So a few days into his quest,

Russ found an engraving that matched the picture on that five-year-old note. And it was an engraving of an ancient structure in India. So it wasn't even a European bridge. 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 not fake. They were fake, fake bridges.

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. So they asked me to come down to London and appear on the show that night, which was very exciting, who doesn't want to be on TV. And Russ won the man, he'll send the designs of the European Beck and expect the drawing board. We hope you are so with us now. Now this was the first one, this is the one that you spotted first of all.

Indeed, this is the pond normandy, which is a very well-known bridge, opened only two years ago in France. The next day my phone was ringing off the look. 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 moment of it. It was quite fun. It was fun for Russ one, but I can't imagine it was fun for Robert Collina who designed the bells.

Collina seemed to take it okay. He basically said in interviews, I thought the bridges were generic enough, but apparently not. Collina had to start all over again. His job was to turn the fake fake bridges into real fake bridges. Collina and the Europeans, they actually consulted with engineers to make sure that they were plausible fake bridges. And in fact, the bills wound up changing a lot. Like, if we look at the before and after of that 500-year-old 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-year-old note,

Kalina got rid of that boat bridge altogether and replaced it with a apparently generic Roman aqueduct. They went through all the bag-note 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.

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 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. 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. They could have increased the supply of passetas 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. It is many countries with lots of different issues and with lots of different economies. Yeah, the dream of the euro was this kind of abstract theoretical idea of a connected Europe. But I think 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. It comes in 2013 when a designer in the Netherlands convinced a town called Spakenysisa to build tiny replicas of the fake bridges on the Euro notes So let's recap it started with the desire to have fake European bridges

They ended up to be real fake European bridges and then they made an effort to make them actually fake fake European bridges 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 miniature golf course bridges. So even though they're real, they seem kind of fake. Yeah, they're even the colors of the Euro notes. So they're not even pretending to be real.

Yeah, the fakes real bridges ever. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! More money talk with Jacob Goldstein.

Now to this. So we're back with Jacob Goldstein, and you authored a new book called Money, the True Story of a Made Up thing. I've read this book. I've also listened to this book and read this book. That's how much I loved this book. And so very kind. I figured, you know, while you're here, just like tell us another story about money.

Okay. Well, let's do another paper money story. We're here talking about paper money. 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 AD. 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. Right? Yeah, 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. Then all of a sudden, these actual banknotes, that are notes from banks, if you will, become the thing that people trade. 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 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 marches. 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. There's 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. Kublai Khan is running China. He says, yeah, there's still going to be paper money, but you actually cannot trade in your paper by metal. Kublai Khan is running China. He says, yeah, there's still gonna 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? Let me tell you, there is a rebellion and the rebellion forces the cons out of China and there is this new dynasty, the Ming dynasty. That is basically reactionary, we 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 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've had this economic flourishing, and then they get rid of it, and they become worse off. Wow. You know, there's all kinds of stories and science fiction stories about lost technologies that people then rediscover, and it's the secret to having a great and bright future is this technology from old that's when 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. Yeah, like in, you know, 1500,500 humanity had this amazing loss technology, right? Paper money. It had sort of helped this giant society flourish for hundreds of years and then vanished from the earth. Well, I love that story. I love the whole book. I thank you so much for being here, Jacob.

Oh, thanks for having me, Roman. The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of a Made Up Thing The True Story of edited by Chris Baroube, mix in tech production by Dara Hirsch, music biore director of sound Sean Riel. Daling Hall is the executive producer at Kurt Colesette is the digital director. Residine includes Vivian Leigh, Emmett Fitzgerald, Lashemondon, Christopher Johnson, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klassker, and me Roman Mars. We are part of the Stitcher and Serious 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 me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi orc. We're on Instagram and ready to. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99pi. I'm the MCI Org. exam by guests.