April 1 — American businessman Oliver Pollock came up with the dollar sign — $ — using the symbol of the Spanish peseta as a model. Thus, the dollar acquired its own symbol even before it became the national currency of the United States in 1785.
In the peseta sign, two strokes over the letter S symbolized the Pillars of Hercules, on which Spain’s coat of arms rests. Two columns wrapped with a ribbon symbolized the edge of the world—the end, a dead end. And the inscription on the ribbon read “nec plus ultra” — “no further”... There is a version that the letter S itself came from the plural endings in the words “dollar” or “peso.”
In Spanish it looks like this: 1 dolar – 2 dolares and 1 peso – 2 pesos, hence the symbol S. There is also an assumption that the dollar symbol comes from a small number 8 that was placed on Spanish pesos equal to 8 reales, and two vertical lines were added to avoid confusion. One way or another, there were countless interpretations and associations: some saw in this squiggle a Latin s nailed down for stability by exclamation marks; others interpreted s as “sale,” and so on. But Americans were sure that the dollar sign was formed as a combination of the first letters of the country’s name, U and S (United States), superimposed on each other, with the lower part of the letter U gradually disappearing. Then many more years passed, and Americans, in order to save time when writing, began to cross the dollar sign with only a single stroke, and that is how the now well-known dollar sign $ came to be.
By the way, the word “dollar” itself comes from the German thaler, derived from the shortened Joachimsthaler münze (a coin from the Valley of St. Joachim). Variants of this name in different countries were: tallero in Italy, dalero in Spain, and daler in Scandinavia.
February 14 — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart writes to his father, Leopold Mozart, telling him, among other things, how much he hates composing for the flute.
August 27 — Mozart and Johann Christian Bach met in Paris.
March 26 — seven-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven gives his first concert performance in Cologne.
January 18 — English navigator James Cook discovered the Hawaiian Islands and named them the Sandwich Islands.
May 1 — Anna Maria Mozart complains of various ailments in a letter from Paris. She will die there two months later.
May 30 — French philosopher Marie-François Voltaire died.
July 2 — French writer and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau died.