250 Fun Facts
250 Amazing Facts: Dinosaurs, Maths, Money, Travel & the Mind
Money & Business Facts
The first known coins were made around 2,600 years ago in Lydia, in what is now Turkey.
Paper money was first used in China more than 1,000 years ago.
The Indian rupee symbol (₹) was designed by D. Udaya Kumar and officially adopted in 2010.
The word "rupee" comes from the Sanskrit word "rupya," which referred to wrought silver.
Sher Shah Suri introduced a silver coin called the "rupiya" in the 1540s, the ancestor of today's rupee.
Indian banknotes have a language panel that shows the note's value in 15 Indian languages, in addition to Hindi and English.
The Reserve Bank of India was established on 1 April 1935.
The word "bank" comes from the Italian "banco," meaning bench, where early moneylenders did business.
The dollar sign ($) is believed to have developed from an abbreviation for the Spanish peso.
Asia's oldest stock exchange started under a banyan tree
In the 1850s, a small group of stockbrokers began meeting under a banyan tree in Mumbai to trade shares. Their group became the Bombay Stock Exchange in 1875, making it the oldest stock exchange in Asia. Today, it is one of the largest and fastest stock exchanges in the world.
United States banknotes aren't made of paper. They're a blend of cotton and linen.
The tiny ridges on the edges of some coins were first added to stop people from shaving off bits of precious metal.
Diners Club launched one of the first modern credit cards in 1950.
The world's first cash machine opened in London in 1967. Its inventor, John Shepherd-Barron, was born in Shillong, India.
India's first ATM was installed in Mumbai in 1987.
In 2010, a man paid 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas. Those coins later became worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Tata Group was founded in 1868 by Jamsetji Tata.
The Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai opened in 1903.
Amul's famous "Utterly Butterly" girl has appeared in its advertisements since 1966, making it one of the longest-running ad campaigns in the world.
Mumbai's dabbawalas are a business-school success story
Every working day, Mumbai's dabbawalas collect around 200,000 home-cooked lunchboxes and deliver them to offices across the city using trains, bicycles and handcarts. Their colour-coded system works with remarkable accuracy, and business schools around the world have studied how they do it.
Infosys was founded in 1981 with a small starting capital of about ₹10,000.
Flipkart started in 2007 as an online bookstore run from a small flat in Bengaluru.
Nokia started in 1865 as a paper mill in Finland.
Samsung began in 1938 as a small trading company selling groceries and dried fish.
Before making cars, Toyota made weaving looms.
Twitter's original name was "twttr."
Starbucks is named after a character in the novel "Moby-Dick."
Adidas and Puma were founded by two German brothers who fell out and started rival shoe companies in the same town.
Lamborghini started out making tractors before moving into sports cars.
Parle-G is one of the best-selling biscuits in the world
Parle-G has been a favourite with Indian families for generations. The "G" originally stood for "glucose." With its famous yellow-and-white packet and affordable price, it is sold in millions of shops across India and is often described as one of the best-selling biscuits in the world.
Kongō Gumi, a Japanese temple-building company founded in 578, operated independently for more than 1,400 years.
The British East India Company had its own private army, which at times was larger than Britain's regular army.
The term "blue chip," meaning a reliable company, comes from poker, where blue chips usually have the highest value.
A rising stock market is called a "bull market" because a bull attacks by thrusting its horns up, while a falling market is a "bear market" because a bear swipes down.
Wall Street in New York is named after a wooden wall built by Dutch settlers in the 1600s.
In 1999, Infosys became the first Indian company to be listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange in the USA.
In 2008, Zimbabwe printed a banknote worth 100 trillion dollars because of extreme inflation.
Hungary had the worst inflation in recorded history in 1946, when prices doubled roughly every 15 hours.
Visitors throw so many coins into Rome's Trevi Fountain that more than a million euros a year are collected and given to charity.
Cowrie shells were once used as money
For centuries, small, shiny cowrie shells were used as currency across parts of Africa and Asia, including India. They were durable, hard to fake and easy to count, which made them perfect for trading. Cowries were used in some places right up until the 1800s.
The US dollar is one of the most widely counterfeited currencies in the world.
The bridges and windows shown on euro banknotes are imaginary designs, so no single country's landmarks are favoured.
Mahatma Gandhi's portrait has appeared on Indian banknotes since the Mahatma Gandhi Series was introduced in 1996.
The ₹2,000 note, introduced in 2016, was withdrawn from circulation in 2023.
The world's oldest bank still operating today is Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena in Italy, founded in 1472.
Punjab National Bank, founded in 1894, was one of the first banks in India started entirely with Indian capital.
The shopping trolley was invented in 1937 by American grocery store owner Sylvan Goldman.
Fixed price tags became popular in the 1800s. Before that, customers usually had to haggle over the price of almost everything.
The old word "cash," used by traders for small coins in South Asia, comes from the Tamil word "kasu."
Muhammad Yunus showed that small loans can change lives
In the 1970s, Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus began lending tiny amounts of money to poor villagers, mostly women, so they could start small businesses. His Grameen Bank grew into a global model for microfinance, and in 2006 he and the bank shared the Nobel Peace Prize.
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