How much is ten bucks worth in 1750?

While doing some research for my book project, I came across a really interesting sitelet put together by Robert Sahr, a political science professor at Oregon State University. He’s gathered enough data to create a historical currency calculator, which compares year-2000 dollars with any other year as far back as 1700. He even has a chart on the net worth of selected wealthy Americans at their death, and what that would mean in today’s dollars. Andrew Carnegie, for example, died in 1919 with $745 million dollars; that’s like having a net worth of almost 5 billion today.

I created a currency converter based on Sahr’s posted data; you can see it here!