Real Fake Bridges

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Roman Mars:
In the early 1990s, a block of European countries embarked on a pretty wild experiment. They decided to get rid of all their money and replace it with a single common currency. Today, the Euro is something we take for granted, but 30 years ago, it was an extraordinary and risky idea. Twelve different countries, who spoke different languages, with different cultures and economies, all using the same paper money. Nobody was sure if it would work.

Jacob Goldstein:
And yet, despite the risk, there were some really good reasons to try it.

Roman Mars:
This is Jacob Goldstein, the author of “Money: The True Story of a Made-up Thing.”

Roman Mars:
Hey Jacob.

Jacob Goldstein:
Hi Roman.

Roman Mars:
So let’s talk about the Euro. Specifically, we’re going to talk about the design of the paper money. But let’s start with the idea of the Euro itself.

Jacob Goldstein:
You can start that story with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

ARCHIVAL TAPE:
[HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCH AN ASTONISHING MOMENT IN HISTORY? THE EAST GERMAN GOVERNMENT SAID TONIGHT THEY WERE GOING TO MAKE MORE OPENINGS IN THE WALL, AT LEAST A DOZEN MORE. PUT BULLDOZERS RIGHT THROUGH THE WALL, SO THAT MORE PEOPLE COULD CROSS TO THE WEST.]

Jacob Goldstein:
East Germany and West Germany had been separate countries since the end of World War II. And in 1990, Germany was about to become one country again. Which was in many ways, a joyous moment, the fall of this repressive regime in East Germany, the reunification of families and communities.

Roman Mars:
But in the post-war era, West Germany had become an economic powerhouse. And Europeans were afraid that a united Germany might be a little too strong, which they had some really grounded historical reasons to be worried about this kind of thing.

Jacob Goldstein:
So the president of France, Francois Mitterrand, came up with a plan. He proposed this deal with the German Chancellor. He said, “We will support a reunified Germany. If you, Germany, agree to give up your national currency and join with your neighbors in this new shared money.” Basically, he wanted to put Germany in this big European bear hug. And Germany said yes.

Roman Mars:
Because who doesn’t love a bear hug?

Jacob Goldstein:
Sure. Especially a European bear hug.

Roman Mars:
And creating the Euro involved all kinds of decisions. Like how do you replace all the money in the ATM machines? And what is the exchange rate between the old currencies and the new one?

Jacob Goldstein:
And there was this one seemingly small question that took up a lot of attention. What was the new money going to look like?

Roman Mars:
Oh, that’s my favorite dilemma.

Jacob Goldstein:
It’s a very you question. It’s a very hard question. Because paper money had been this kind of nationalistic thing. A place where a country would put pictures of their heroes and their landmarks. But the point of the Euro was to transcend nationalism. To build this single, unified Europe.

Jacob Goldstein:
So if you put, say, the Reichstag on the hundred Euro note, and the Eiffel tower on the 50, the French would be like, “How come the Germans got the hundred? And we only got the 50?” And then the Dutch would be like, “At least you got the 50, we didn’t get anything on any bill.”

Roman Mars:
So when the architects of the Euro announced a contest to design the new banknotes, they added a rule: no national heroes, or national symbols, or national landmarks. Which doesn’t leave a lot of options.

Jacob Goldstein:
Still, designers from 14 different European central banks submitted ideas. And on December 13th 1996, the head of the European Monetary Institute had a press conference to announce the winner.

ARCHIVAL TAPE:
[WE WANTED FIRST TO INFORM THE HEADS OF STATE AND GOVERNMENT ABOUT THIS CHOICE BECAUSE THIS CHOICE IS CLEARLY OF A MAJOR SYMBOLIC SIGNIFICANCE.]

Jacob Goldstein:
The winner, he said, was an Austrian banknote designer named Robert Kalina. In the Kalina designs, there was no Eiffel tower, no famous author, or General, or Queen. Instead, Kalina chose the most inoffensive symbols imaginable.

ARCHIVAL TAPE:
[THE DESIGN EMPHASIZES THREE MAIN ARCHITECTURAL ELEMENTS: WINDOWS, GATEWAYS, AND BRIDGES.]

Jacob Goldstein:
The metaphors write themselves. Openness, connection, exactly what you want at this moment when a big chunk of Europe was joining together to use a single kind of money for the first time since the Roman empire.

Jacob Goldstein:
And for the metaphors to work, they had to make sure these inoffensive symbols didn’t represent a particular country. So the pictures on the bills weren’t actual windows and gateways and bridges. They were pretend bridges, imaginary gateways. The images on the paper money were supposed to exude European-ness, but not Spanish-ness, or French-ness, or German-ness.

Roman Mars:
Everything went fine with the windows and gateways. The problem was the bridges.

Jacob Goldstein:
The person who figured out that the problem was the bridges, was a bridge-loving British journalist named Russ Swan. He was the editor of a magazine called Bridge Design and Engineering. I talked to him recently and he told me that, of course, he was delighted to learn that pretend bridges were going to feature prominently on Europe’s new money.

Russ Swan:
We are the bridge people, and they are using our thing for their thing. And, you know, that’s excellent.

Jacob Goldstein:
So Russ figured he would do a little story for his magazine about the paper money. He requested a press pack with pictures of the bills. This was the mid-nineties, the web was just getting going. And the Euro people sent him pictures. The bridges on the bills go in chronological order. So the oldest bridges are on the smallest bills. It’s like this little tour through architectural history. And as Russ is looking at these pictures, the first thing that catches his eye, is the 500 Euro note, which is the biggest bill, and the most modern bridge.

Roman Mars:
The 500 Euro has a cable-stayed bridge. It’s a modern-style bridge, where there are these straight cables holding up most of the structure. It’s graphically very striking and lovely. Again, this is supposed to be a generic example of a bridge, not a real landmark. But Russ noticed something wrong with this supposedly fake bridge.

Russ Swan:
It looked like a bridge I’d been to visit six, seven weeks earlier in Northern France. It’s called the Pont De Normandie, the Normandy Bridge. And I thought, you know what, I think that’s the Normandy. I think that’s not the fictitious structure that the European Union have said it was”.

Roman Mars:
So there are a lot of cable-stayed bridges, and they all kind of look like this. But underneath the bridge at the sides, are these pillars. And there’s this one spot where you’d expect to see a pillar, but there is no pillar. And that’s true for the Pont De Normandie. And it’s also true for this design.

Jacob Goldstein:
Russ calls up the designer of the bridge who he’d talked to for the magazine, and he winds up faxing him a picture of this 500 Euro bill.

Russ Swan:
And he came back to me within moments and said, “This is my bridge, I recognize it. This is absolutely positively the bridge that I designed. The bridge that you and I stood on six weeks ago in Northern France. I will stand up in a court of law and swear on anything you like that this is my bridge because there are these features that are specific to this bridge.” Now, of course, this made me think, I’ve found one. I wonder if I can find some more.

Roman Mars:
If you are the editor of Bridge Design and Engineering, this is your moment.

Jacob Goldstein:
So over the next couple of days, Russ looked through books and old photographs, trying to identify these supposedly fake bridges on the other Euro notes. And right away, he saw this picture of the Rialto.

Russ Swan:
It’s a famous and really very beautiful bridge in the middle of Venice. There’s an arch below, there’s a parade of shops going up one side, at an angle of maybe 30 degrees, and down the other side at 30 degrees. So when you look at the bridge, your eye is drawn to the superstructure, to the stuff on top of the bridge, which is the walkways and the shops, and so forth.

Roman Mars:
Russ thought the masonry of the Rialto bridge looked awfully familiar. So he mentally removed the walkways and the shops, and all the other stuff on top of the bridge itself.

Russ Swan:
I realized that that was it. That was exactly what the banknote designer had done. He’d just stripped off the top and basically did a cut and paste job onto his 50 Euro banknote design.

Jacob Goldstein:
So now Russ had two: the 500 is the Pont De Normandie, the 50 is the Rialto in Venice but with the buildings removed from the top. And over the next few days, he figured out a few more. The 100 Euro note was the Pont De Neuilly, a rail and road bridge in Paris. The 10 Euro note is a Roman aqueduct in Segovia. And finally, there was the image on the five Euro note, the smallest bill, the oldest bridge.

Russ Swan:
It was a boat bridge. So it’s not really a structure in its own right, it’s a series of boats with planks across them. A very ancient way of crossing a river.

Roman Mars:
This is one of my favorite choices. It’s this lovely old proto-bridge. More than a bridge itself, it’s a would-be bridge.

Jacob Goldstein:
Clever, right? Really clever in a really kind of low-tech way. So a few days into his quest, Russ found an engraving that matched the picture on that five Euro note.

Russ Swan:
And it was an engraving of an ancient structure in India.

Roman Mars:
So it wasn’t even a European bridge.

Jacob Goldstein:
Yeah, bonus points, right? It’s both not “not real”, and it’s not in Europe. So now Russ had all these different bridges he had identified, he tried to call the banknote designer, Kalina, but couldn’t reach him. And he decided it was time to tell the world that these fake bridges, were not fake. They were fake “fake” bridges.

Russ Swan:
So I wrote up the story for the magazine. The magazine was about to go to press.

Jacob Goldstein:
He pitched the story to the BBC’s main TV news show, and they wanted to do it.

Russ Swan:
So they asked me to come down to London and appear on the show that night, which was just all very exciting. Who doesn’t want to be on TV?

ARCHIVAL TAPE:
[REPORTER: AND RUSS SWAN, THE MAN WHO’LL SEND THE DESIGNERS OF THE EUROPEAN BANKNOTES BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD, WE HOPE, IS WITH US NOW. NOW THIS WAS THE FIRST ONE, THIS WAS THE ONE THAT YOU SPOTTED FIRST OF ALL.]

[RUSS SWAN: INDEED. THIS IS THE PONT DE NORMANDIE, WHICH IS A VERY WELL-KNOWN BRIDGE, OPENED ONLY TWO YEARS AGO IN FRANCE….]

Russ Swan:
The next day, my phone was ringing off the hook. I got page one lead in the Wall Street Journal. It was in newspapers in Finland, in Brazil. I was briefly almost famous and enjoyed every moment of it, it was quite fun.

Roman Mars:
It was fun for Russ Swan, but I can’t imagine it was fun for Robert Kalina who designed the bills.

Jacob Goldstein:
Kalina seemed to take it okay. He basically said in interviews, “I thought the bridges were generic enough, but apparently not.”

Roman Mars:
Kalina had to start all over again. His job was to turn the fake “fake” bridges into real fake bridges.

Jacob Goldstein:
Kalina and the Europeans, they actually consulted with engineers to make sure that they were plausible fake bridges.

Roman Mars:
And in fact, the bills wound up changing a lot.

Jacob Goldstein:
If we look at the before and after of that 500 Euro note, you can see on the old 500 note, there was the missing pillar. That was the dead giveaway, that it was a real bridge. The new version has that pillar, and it really looks like a fake bridge. And then maybe most interesting, on the five Euro note, Kalina got rid of that boat bridge altogether, and replaced it with an apparently generic Roman aqueduct.

Roman Mars:
They went through all the banknote designs. They fixed the money. But the question is, did the Euro actually achieve its high-minded ideals that it was trying to achieve? Like, did it really bring Europe together?

Jacob Goldstein:
At first, it did. At first, everybody loved the Euro. It really did feel one Europe coming together in a common currency. But the new money ultimately couldn’t paper over the economic differences between the different countries in Europe. And that really became clear after the financial crisis of 2008. Some countries like Germany recovered fairly quickly, but other countries like Spain and Greece did not.

ARCHIVAL TAPE:
[TONIGHT, A COUNTRY DEEPLY DIVIDED. ALL WEEK, THE BANKS CLOSED, LIFE SAVINGS LOCKED UP INSIDE, ENDLESS LINES AT ATMS.]

Jacob Goldstein:
And if Spain and Greece had still had their own money at that time, they could have printed more of it. They could’ve increased the supply of pesetas and drachmas to help their economies recover. But they’d given up that power when they joined the Euro, so their economies just got worse and worse. They wound up limping along for years, and there is a good argument that the Euro itself made them worse off.

Roman Mars:
Yeah. Like you could make a generic European bridge, for a generic European currency, but you can’t make an actually generic Europe. It is many countries, with lots of different issues, and with lots of different economies.

Jacob Goldstein:
Yeah. The dream of the Euro was this kind of abstract, theoretical idea of a connected Europe. But I think maybe – maybe they should have kept those original Euro designs. The ones with the pictures of real bridges, to remind themselves that Europeans don’t live in some abstract Europe with pretend bridges. They cross real bridges to real countries.

Roman Mars:
But there’s one more twist to this real bridge/fake bridge story.

Jacob Goldstein:
It comes in 2013, when a designer in the Netherlands convinced a town called Spijkenisse to build tiny replicas of the fake bridges on the Euro notes.

Roman Mars:
So let’s recap. It started with the desire to have fake European bridges. They ended up to be real fake European bridges, and then they made an effort to make them actually fake “fake” European bridges. And now those fake European bridges are real bridges that exist in a little town outside of Rotterdam.

Jacob Goldstein:
But they’re like, so small, they seem like miniature golf course bridges. So even though they’re real, they seem kind of fake.

Roman Mars:
Yeah. They’re even the colors of the Euro notes. So they’re not even pretending to be real.

Jacob Goldstein:
Yeah, the fakest real bridges ever.

Roman Mars:
More money talk with Jacob Goldstein, after this.

[BREAK]

Roman Mars:
So we’re back with Jacob Goldstein, and you authored a new book called “Money: The True Story of a Made-up Thing.” I’ve read this book, I’ve also listened to the book, and read this book. That’s how much I loved this book.

Jacob Goldstein:
Very kind.

Roman Mars:
And so I figured, while you were here, just tell us another story about money.

Jacob Goldstein:
Okay, well let’s do another paper money story. We’re here talking about paper money, and the origin of paper money is a really interesting story, that, to be honest, I didn’t know, before I was working on the book. I’d been covering money for years, but the origin of paper money was new to me.

Jacob Goldstein:
And so that story takes place in China, around the year 1000 AD. It happens in the province of Sichuan, and at that time in Sichuan, they were using iron coins for money. And iron is a bad thing to use for money, because it’s not worth very much, right?

Roman Mars:
A little heavy!

Jacob Goldstein:
Yeah, it’s heavy! So you needed a pound and a half of iron coins to buy a pound of salt, right? It’s like, you have to go grocery shopping with pennies or something. It’s just bad. It’s just bad kind of money. And so this merchant in Sichuan, at some point starts saying to people, look, you leave your terrible iron money with me and I’ll give you a receipt. Like a claim check. Roman left 1000 iron coins at my shop. And you can probably see what’s going to happen.

Roman Mars:
Then all of a sudden, these actual “bank” notes – they are notes from banks saying how much money you have – become the thing that people trade.

Jacob Goldstein:
Exactly, exactly. They turn into money. And in fact, for a really long time, until the 20th century, paper money will be a claim check for metal, right? More often silver or gold. But this idea that what paper money is, is a receipt, and that the thing that it is representing is silver or gold, persists for a really long time. And in China, it starts with these private merchants, but then the government gets involved. They see that it’s working well, the government takes over the business of printing paper money. And there is this real flourishing in China around this time, connected to, and driven in part by, the paper money. You see more trade and you see science and you see urbanization, enabled in part by the increased trade. You know, like this whole restaurant scene springs up, and you have cities of a million people in China, which is like 10x the size of European cities at that time.

Roman Mars:
Wow.

Jacob Goldstein:
And this persists for hundreds of years. Eventually they actually try money, not backed by metal. Kublai Khan is running China. He says, yeah, there’s still going to be a paper money, but you actually cannot trade in your paper for metal, for bronze. It was bronze coins at that time. And it worked. They had money in China, hundreds of years before there was any paper money at all in the West. Really remarkable.

Roman Mars:
Yeah. So what happened?

Jacob Goldstein:
Let me tell you! There is a rebellion, and the rebellion forces the Kahns out of China. And there is this new dynasty, the Ming dynasty, that is basically reactionary, we would say today. They don’t like this paper money, and all of this trade, and all these cities. The ideal for the Ming dynasty rulers is the self-sufficient agricultural village. And they actually wind up getting rid of paper money. This real breakthrough that helped people live better material lives, disappears. And so for a while, there is no paper money anywhere in the world anymore. There’s a few hundred years where paper money has just gone from the face of the earth. And then it appears in Europe a few hundred years later. And in fact, after they get rid of paper money in China, China gets poorer. They’d had this economic flourishing, and then they get rid of it, and they become worse off.

Roman Mars:
Wow. You know, there’s all kinds of stories and science fiction stories about lost technologies that people then rediscover, and that’s the secret to having a great and bright future, is this technology from old that’s been rediscovered. But there was this one, and it was paper money. And we just didn’t have it out of choice for a long time.

Jacob Goldstein:
That’s a really nice read of it. Yeah. In 1500, humanity had this amazing lost technology, right? Paper money. It had sort of helped this giant society flourished for hundreds of years and then vanished from the earth.

Roman Mars:
Well, I love that story. I love the whole book. Thank you so much for being here, Jacob.

Jacob Goldstein:
Oh, thanks for having me. Roman.

Roman Mars:
Jacob Goldstein’s book is called “Money: The True Story of a Made-up Thing.” It’s fantastic.

———

Roman Mars:
99% Invisible was produced this week by Jacob Goldstein. Edited by Chris Berube. Mix and tech production by Dara Hirsch. Music by our director of sound Sean Real. Delaney Hall is the executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Vivian Le, Emmett FitzGerald, Lasha Madan, Christopher Johnson, Joe Rosenberg, Sofia Klatzker, and me, Roman Mars.

We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building — in beautiful uptown Oakland, California.

You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me @romanmars and the show @99piorg. We’re on Instagram and Reddit, too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org.