This British Information Services film from the late 1940s, written and produced by Donald Taylor, traces the history of money and the evolution of bartering to banking. The film opens with a shot of a man scooping up coins and weighing them on a scale. In Africa, people heard cattle (02:10); footage shows women sorting what appears to be nuts in a village. People ride camels across a desert’s dunes. Images show some ornaments and jewelry that were early forms of barter material. The film shows early coins on a glass display case (04:12), then it shows closeups of some of the coins. A man pulls out a drawer containing rare coins (04:55). There is an image of a goldsmith’s sign (05:56). A person stores, or “deposits,” valuables in a gold shop to provide a receipt of the value, which was exchanged in bartering transactions. This led the goldsmith to evolve into a banker. The film shows examples of early promissory notes. A blank note is shown, which is the forerunner to checks (08:40). Bankers exchange checks and coins at a wooden table (09:22). There is a picture of the Five Bells, London’s first clearing house (09:52). Viewers see the minting of coins. Two men open a vault door and get out bags of cash (10:40). At a bank teller window, a customer cashes a check. A bank employee carries bags of money into a branch of Barclays Bank (11:24). The film features shots of various checks, including ones issued by Barclays Bank Limited, Lloyds Bank Limited, and British Bank Limited. Women sort checks inside a central clearing house (11:57). A banker looks at the checks sent to his bank from the central clearing house (12:43). There is a montage of shots of industries: a tractor being manufactured, people working on an assembly line, and men building a house. People use money to pay for goods and services: a man buys a newspaper (14:27), a bartender serves a customer a beer, and a conductor collects train fare. The film concludes with a shot of what appears to be Britain’s Royal Mint (14:51)—viewers see the front edifice of the building then the inspecting of coins as they move on a conveyer belt inside the mint.

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This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com