4 ms·

I think the original link already includes the conversion w/ inflation. It says that the book retailed for fivepence in 1735 which is ₤10 8s. 4d in today's mon

I think the original link already includes the conversion w/ inflation. It says that the book retailed for fivepence in 1735 which is ₤10 8s. 4d in today's money. It would be interesting to see the math behind this though. When I tried myself I got £3.63 ($4.66 USD) but that is taking into the account the inflation of the UK pound, not the local Boston pound (https://crowd-media.loc.gov/cm-uploads/resources/colonial_currency.pdf https://crowd-media.loc.gov/cm-uploads/resources/colonial_cu...). Before decimalization, a pound was 240 pence, so fivepence should be 0.02p today (5/240). Here we can find that in 1735 one pound is £181.43 in today's money: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in... That comes out to £1.81 per pence or £3.63 for 2p. I'm probably wrong but it was an interesting rabbit hole to go down.

silisili 2y ago
For anyone as confused as I was until I looked it up, s is for shillings, d for pence.
mjd 2y ago
I had tried out that Bank of England page, while I was writing the article, but I decided not to mention it. It wasn't clear to me that £10 in London in 1735 would mean the same thing as £10 in Philadelphia, where hard money was probably much scarcer. So I left it out.
- ralferoo 2y ago
  It should be approximately the same in theory - £1 was pegged to the price of silver, although of course there might be local differences in demand causing the price of silver to vary relative to the price of gold. In practice, I think the values should be approximately the same, as significant regional variations would be normalised to speculators moving them around from place to place to make a profit until the demand reached an equilibirium.
  - mjd 2y ago
    But the price of goods is going to be completely different because of availability, shipping costs, import duties, etc. etc. etc. Franklin's Autobiography has that famous story about his first day in Philadelphia when he tried to buy three pennies' worth of bread and was taken by surprise hen he got three giant rolls instead of the tiny loaf he was expecting. And that was just the difference between Boston and Philadelphia.
ralferoo 2y ago
> I think the original link already includes the conversion w/ inflation. It says that the book retailed for fivepence in 1735 which is ₤10 8s. 4d in today's money. No, it didn't say that, that was the total. It said that 500 copies of the book at fivepence was worth ₤10 8s. 4d, and the maths checks out on that: 5500=2500 pence (written 2500d as old pence). There are 20 shillings in a pound, and 12 pence in shilling, so 2400d = £10, with 100d remaining. 8 shillings is 96d, so from 100d leaves 4d remaining, which matches exactly what was originally written. The post-decimalisation equivalent preserved 20 shillings to a pound, so 1s=5p. An interesting fact is the new 5p coins were the same size, and existing shillings continued to be legal tender for another two decades, until the size of the 5p coin was changed. So, the parent to your post was totally wrong with the $10.84, it should be £10 + 40p + 1½p (closest to 5p4/12), so £10.41½ after decimalisation. The closest conversion rate I could find to the time the US introduced the dollar was £1 = $4.55, because it was done at the prevailing values of gold and silver at the time. Using your link, and adding precision to the numbers, £10415 in 1735 would be £1,889,613 today, so £108s4d then would be £1889.61 today as the total gift. Dividing by the 500 copies gives £3.78 each today, which is close to your approximation (most of the difference will be the accuracy lost in rounding 5/240 to 0.02). The inflation rates are also certain to have been difference in the US though, if for no other reason that the current exchange rate is approx. £1 = $1.28, so at the very least it's close to a factor of 4 out in the period since the US dollar was introduced.

silisili 2y ago

For anyone as confused as I was until I looked it up, s is for shillings, d for pence.

mjd 2y ago

I had tried out that Bank of England page, while I was writing the article, but I decided not to mention it. It wasn't clear to me that £10 in London in 1735 would mean the same thing as £10 in Philadelphia, where hard money was probably much scarcer. So I left it out.

ralferoo 2y ago
It should be approximately the same in theory - £1 was pegged to the price of silver, although of course there might be local differences in demand causing the price of silver to vary relative to the price of gold. In practice, I think the values should be approximately the same, as significant regional variations would be normalised to speculators moving them around from place to place to make a profit until the demand reached an equilibirium.
- mjd 2y ago
  But the price of goods is going to be completely different because of availability, shipping costs, import duties, etc. etc. etc. Franklin's Autobiography has that famous story about his first day in Philadelphia when he tried to buy three pennies' worth of bread and was taken by surprise hen he got three giant rolls instead of the tiny loaf he was expecting. And that was just the difference between Boston and Philadelphia.

ralferoo 2y ago

> I think the original link already includes the conversion w/ inflation. It says that the book retailed for fivepence in 1735 which is ₤10 8s. 4d in today's money. No, it didn't say that, that was the total. It said that 500 copies of the book at fivepence was worth ₤10 8s. 4d, and the maths checks out on that: 5500=2500 pence (written 2500d as old pence). There are 20 shillings in a pound, and 12 pence in shilling, so 2400d = £10, with 100d remaining. 8 shillings is 96d, so from 100d leaves 4d remaining, which matches exactly what was originally written. The post-decimalisation equivalent preserved 20 shillings to a pound, so 1s=5p. An interesting fact is the new 5p coins were the same size, and existing shillings continued to be legal tender for another two decades, until the size of the 5p coin was changed. So, the parent to your post was totally wrong with the $10.84, it should be £10 + 40p + 1½p (closest to 5p4/12), so £10.41½ after decimalisation. The closest conversion rate I could find to the time the US introduced the dollar was £1 = $4.55, because it was done at the prevailing values of gold and silver at the time. Using your link, and adding precision to the numbers, £10415 in 1735 would be £1,889,613 today, so £108s4d then would be £1889.61 today as the total gift. Dividing by the 500 copies gives £3.78 each today, which is close to your approximation (most of the difference will be the accuracy lost in rounding 5/240 to 0.02). The inflation rates are also certain to have been difference in the US though, if for no other reason that the current exchange rate is approx. £1 = $1.28, so at the very least it's close to a factor of 4 out in the period since the US dollar was introduced.