Dollar

The two most potent symbols of power in the modern world, the dollar, and nuclear weapons come from this quaint mining town in the Bohemian hills, Jachymov, Czech.

• Jachymov, Czech: When vast quantities of silver were discovered in 1516, enterprising local nobleman Count Hieronymus Schlick christened the area Joachimsthal (“Joachim’s valley”) after Jesus’ grandfather, the local patron saint of miners. 
• City-states in Europe and one of the most effective ways rulers could assert their control was to mint their own currency.
• The count stamped an image of Joachim on the front, the Bohemian lion on the back, and named his new currency “Joachimsthalers” – which soon became shortened to “thalers”.
• Schlick did two things to spread thalers:
• First, he made the thaler the same weight and diameter so that it is widely accepted
• Second, he minted more coins than the world had ever seen.
•  Joachimsthal was the second-largest city in Bohemia after Prague with more silver mining industry
• Joachimsthal’s silver deposits soon ran dry, but thaler was so well known across Europe that when the Holy Roman Empire sought to establish a standard size and silver content for the many local currencies in its kingdom, it chose the thaler, calling all acceptable silver coins “Reichsthalers” (“thalers of the empire”).
• For the next 300 years, many countries around the world modeled their money after the thaler
• Rulers across Europe began remodeling thalers and they also renamed them in their own languages. 
• Denmark, Norway, Sweden: daler
• Iceland: dalur. 
• Italy: tallero
• Poland: talar
• Greece: tàliro
• Hungary: tallér
• France: jocandale
• But it was the Dutch leeuwendaler (“lion dollar”, or “daler” for short – pronounced nearly identically to the English “dollar”) that gave the US currency its name.
• The dollar became the US’ official currency in 1792 and ever since the thaler-inspired dollar has continued its march.
• And Jachymov’s last operational mine, Svornost, which supplied silver for the very first dollars, now pumps radioactive water to a trio of eerie, lavish resorts advertising “radon-water therapy.”

Dark side of the silver mining:

• Miners began to encounter a mysterious pitch-black substance that led to an alarmingly high incidence of fatal lung diseases. While sifting through the town’s mines in 1898, a physicist named Marie Curie identified that the same ore that had produced the first dollars contained two new radioactive elements: radium and polonium. Marie Curie also died of radiation effects.
• The same mines that coined the world’s currency would now power the nuclear arms race.
• For the next several decades, the town’s reopened silver mines became the world’s foremost source of radium. The Nazis experimented with a nuclear reactor here. The “father of the atomic bomb”, Oppenheimer wrote his thesis on Joachimsthal’s uranium-rich shafts. And after Czechoslovakia reclaimed Joachimsthal from Germany after World War Two – renaming it Jáchymov and expelling the German-speaking population that had lived here for centuries with Czech settlers. Before the war, the people who lived here were very proud of creating the dollar. But when the population changed, this memory was lost and the mines became exploited to help Russia create the A-bomb.”

 

Dollar symbol $:

"A variant of the above theory claims that the sign comes from the mark of the mint at Potosí, where a large portion of the Spanish Empire's silver was mined, also featured on those coin, which consisted of the letters "P T S I" superimposed. The core of this monogram is a (single-stroked) $ sign.^"

^{[Update on 11/29/21]}