In our day, when money is commonly an abstraction issued in paper notes or in even more airy forms like “credits,” it’s a little hard to imagine the big deal about a switch to paper currency. But consider that for most of human history money was valuable only for the materials it was made out of. In the newly-established British base in America these materials were in short supply: Britain was facing a shortage of precious metals at home, and was reluctant to part with any for the sake of the colonists. So the colonists, technically in defiance of the king’s orders, went to strike their own currency, a .14-ounce (4 gram) silver “pine tree schilling.” That mint was shut down in 1689, and the British took to issuing essentially promissory notes to pay colonists fighting the French in Canada.

On this day, February 3rd, in 1609, the first of these promissory notes were issued by the Massachusetts authority. The certificates contained a statement by the British government that upon the conclusion of the war, its bearer would be able to trade in for two schillings from the British treasury.

The experiment caught on, and colonists became increasingly dependent on the paper money. The notes had only one, albeit quite problematic, downside: they could easily be forged. One of the earliest examples on record, now held by the Smithsonian museum, is an expertly counterfeited piece that added a “0” to the “2” that indicated the amount of schillings the noteholder would get as a reward.