To come back, however, to the conception of figures and the difficulty in understanding proportions. I know what is meant by 1, or 10, or 100, or 1000, or 100,000, or 1,000,000, but when I get into a billion, and try to encompass that, my ideas are vague. When I read that the Secretary of the Treasury gave, some time ago, this figure as the money in circulation in the United States, $1,606,139,735, I got lost with that figure 1 which stood before the other nine figures.
Now who does exactly appreciate what is a million? A young friend of mine asked me to show him "a million of anything." I might have taken the grains of sand on the sea-beach, and counted and weighed out an ounce of them, but that would have been troublesome work. Had I done so, however, I could have shown him a million of grains of sand. I had, however, some No. 9 shot, just such shot as are used for snipe-shooting, and then, as luck would have it, a No. 9 shot is just about the size of the letter "o" in Harper's Round Table. The manufacturers of shot, who know exactly what are the diameters of their leaden pellets, tell me that a No. 9 drop-shot has a diameter of 8/100 of an inch, and that 568 of such shot weigh one ounce. Therefore 1,000,000 of such shot would weigh 110 pounds, and a trifle of an ounce over.
I wanted, however, to get some idea of bulk. I had a box made one inch high, one inch deep—in fact, a cubic inch. This I filled with No. 9 shot, and it held just about 2000 pellets. Now a million of these shot would be, of course, 500 times 2000 pellets, or 500 little boxes would hold the million. If, then, I had a big box made to contain the million, this receptacle would have to be about eight inches on all sides. I can get of this some idea as to the bulk of these small shot by the million.
The more ways I could look at a million, the better I thought I would understand it. I wrote to the Treasury Department in Washington, and I put two questions, which one of the leading authorities answered in the most obliging manner. All I have to do, then, is to copy this gentleman's letter.
Treasury Department, Office of the Treasurer,
Washington, D. C., March 16, 1893.
Sir,—You ask me the following questions: 1st. How long does it take, under the most advantageous circumstances, for an expert to count 100,000 silver dollars? 2d. How long does it take, under the most advantageous circumstances, for an expert to count one hundred thousand notes?
In reply to the first inquiry, permit me to state that for a continuous count of an expert it will require twenty hours to handle 100,000 standard silver dollars. Under ordinary conditions, and observing the rules and regulations of the office for count as to correctness, and at the same time keep a careful eye for the detection of counterfeits, 4500 per hour, or 27,000 per six working hours each day is about the limit of capacity of our experts in that line.
To the second inquiry I may say that it will take an expert 16-2/3 hours to count 100,000 new notes, and for a current or ordinary day's work 40,000 notes is about all that can be done.
Respectfully yours,
E. H. Nebeker,
Treasurer U. S.
Take, then, a million of silver dollars, and set an expert counting it. If he worked night and day over it, lost no time in eating, drinking, or sleeping, he would finish a fairly tough job of counting a million of silver dollars in precisely 8-1/3 days.
I asked the Washington authority to give me some general idea as to the weight of 100,000 standard silver dollars, and the Acting Assistant Treasurer wrote me, "that 100,000 standard silver dollars will weigh 7161.5 pounds troy, and will occupy a space of 10.49 cubic feet." Then a million of silver dollars would weigh 71,615 pounds troy. The silver brick takes up less room than coin in some respects, but a vault made to hold a million of dollars worth of silver bullion must have more size than an ordinary coal cellar.
If you want to get swamped with figures, supposing at least you have the conception of what is a million of dollars, the total stock of money in the world is $3,656,935,000 in gold, and $3,944,700,000 in silver, making a grand total of $7,601,635,000. Say that the population of the United States is 65,000,000, then about this amount of money, $10.47 in gold, $8.55 in silver, $6.51 in paper notes, or $25.62, suffices for each one's use. If there was not as much money as that per head—little boys and little girls and babies included—the fathers, who hold the purse-strings, would complain that money was tight or hard to get, and exchange of goods for coin would be difficult.