You may have seen some videos doing the rounds online: the new British 5 pound banknote and
the new Australian $5 note being used as the needle for a record player.
It’s pretty cool – they actually play music!
Oh that's so cool!
But like any story involving Britain and Australia, one of us had to do it better.
It’s a friendly rivalry!
And according to some reports, the 5 pound note is so much more awesome than Australia’s.
So I felt like I had to look into it.
I’m not letting my dollarydoos go down unjustly.
"$900 Dollarydoos!"
And it turns out – the science behind these two notes is exactly the same.
They’re made from the same technology and the same materials.
But the interesting thing is that the new 5 pound banknote wouldn’t even be around
if it wasn’t for the Australian dollar.
Let me take you back in time.
On February 14 1966, Australia broke free from the mother country and released it’s
own decimal currency.
After a nationwide competition to name our notes – submissions included the “austral”,
“boomer”, “kwid” and “ming” we settled on “dollar”.
Pretty unoriginal.
Around the same time, some guys in a Melbourne pub hatched a plan to print fake notes with
simple office equipment– they pocketed eight hundred thousand dollars worth of forgeries
in 1966 – an adjusted value of over ten million dollars today.
They got some serious bank.
But, the next year, most of the guys from the pub went to jail – it turned out one
of them became a police informant – and there was a general distrust of $10 notes
– some unions wouldn’t accept them in their pay packet – let’s call it the $10
side-eye.
Then the next year – 1968 if you’re playing along at home – the Reserve Bank of Australia
turned to the national science agency CSIRO and said, “we need all of the science”
or something to that effect I couldn’t actually find a direct quote so I just made that one
up.
And they teamed up to create the polymer banknote – the world’s most secure cash money that
debuted in 1988.
It underwent a lot of testing leading up to its release, like “the feel test” that
I found this picture of.
Just gonna leave that up here for another second.
From there the polymer banknote technology kept improving and it’s culminated in this
$5 note, that was released in September, 2016.
Look, there’s the Queen!
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These banknotes have a fair bit of bling, like this transparent window that has an Optically
Variable Device – it splits and diffracts light into several beams, so their appearance
changes when the note is viewed in different directions.
In fact, the anti-counterfeiting features of these notes are full of cool party tricks.
If you carry a clip on microscope lens around in your handbag like I do, you can see the
microtext printed on the $10 note.
I kind of wish I was joking but I do actually take this everywhere.
On Australia’s 10-er, there’s the poem The Man From Snowy River, which is printed
as shading behind the man who wrote it, Banjo Patterson.
There’s a bunch of microtext on notes where it looks like shading.
"Where the wild bushhorses are and the stockhorse snuffs the battle with... 10 dollars, 10 dollars,
10 dollars, 10 dollars, 10 dollars.
Isn't that great?
On the new $5, it says “five dollars, five dollars, five dollars” you get the picture.
But, of course, the best party trick is that you can use the notes as a record needle.
Really you can use any of the older notes, the new ones just work better because they’re
super crisp and don’t have as much wear and tear.
Okay, let's see if I can actually do this.
The polymer these notes are made from is called BOPP, kind of fitting in this case, and it’s
non-fibrous and non-porous material.
It has a strong plastic structure and while they’re really flexible they also have rigid,
sharp corners – more so than other fibrous materials like paper.
These pointy corners are the key to making music, because they ride along the groove
in the record and the tip of the note vibrates back and forth in the groove.
It kinda wiggles around in there.
The rest of the note carries these vibrations along its length and the air around the note
vibrates too.
The banknote actually amplifies the sound – just like those big horns on something
more old school, like a phonograph.
Our brains decode those vibrations to give us the sensation of sound – all being created
by the beautiful harmony of a record and these dolla dolla dolla dolla dolla bills.
And in the last 20 odd years, this polymer banknote technology has been licensed to 24
other countries.
It's used in notes from Canada to Mexico… but not in between.
(Seriously, these are terrible).
So thanks for using our Australian science, Britain!
And all those other countries around the world too.
Please don’t claim to have a better banknote than the humble dollarydoo.
I hope everyone realises how cool these things you just have in your wallet are.
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