John Jones's Dollar by Harry Stephen Keeler

However the original first appearance was in 1915, when the concept of accumulated interest at 3% over decades held more potential interest. Hugo Gernsback reprinted the story in the April 1927 issue of Amazing Stories, and Sam Moskowitz got it reprinted again in Amazing in the early 1960s. The story 'John Jones' Dollar' was originally published in the August 1915 issue of The Black Cat magazine. For example:Īt one point I had traced this story back to its 1927 appearance in Amazing Stories, but Bob Jennings kindly wrote to let me know that it is even older: all of the students are male), but I like other aspects as still being clever.

In some ways, this story is dated (e.g.

Instead, all one would see would be a decrease in the value of that dollar as not just John Jones's descendants but anyone with investments would be making money, which would simply devalue it.

And, even given the idea that value could just increase forever, the idea of the story is silly since one dollar invested by someone in the past would not grow in value beyond all that anyone else owns since other people also have money to invest.

Of course, since that time, nobody would fall for the myth of perpetual economic growth! (BTW In case this sarcasm is not so obvious far in the future when someone may read this remark, let me add that a recent resurgence of this same myth resulted in some unpleasantness.) It is interesting to me that in 1915 (prior to the big crash of '29), the idea that an investment would just keep growing and growing (unless the bank was robbed, which the story does mention) may have seemed reasonable.It is cool that this story from 1915 seemingly predicts the current fad for 'distance education' which is a hot topic in academia as well as cordless (cell?) phones:.However, as long as I'm adding this here, I'd like to add some remarks of a non-mathematical nature: There is one other tiny bit of mathematics in the form of this quote:

Perhaps I was just being snooty, or perhaps my standards have changed, but Vijay Fafat has convinced me to add it to the database now. In the past, I did not consider this to be sufficiently mathematical to be included in this database. The main mathematical content of this science fiction story is an illustration of the potential of exponential growth in the form of considering how a single dollar invested in a bank would grow in value over many years to be a huge sum: (click on names to see more mathematical fiction A list compiled by Alex Kasman ( College of Charleston)

John Jones's Dollar by Harry Stephen Keeler