Money box
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A money box is a storage container for coins, typically used by children to teach them lessons in saving. Some boxes have locks or need to be broken to allow the money to be removed, while others have keys or other locking mechanism meaning a parent has control on when it can be opened.
The typical sort of money box is a Piggy bank, a plastic, steel or porcelain pig shaped container.
But money boxes come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, from bank buildings, trains, comic book or bank saving characters (like the Dollarmites of the Commonwealth Bank) through to cubes or cans with corporate logos on them.
Also there are found many late 18th early 19th century money boxes with simple mechanical actions like found in the Museum at the Bank of Montreal.
- A small steel painted horse that a penny was placed in its mouth, and a leaver on the box which the horse stood was pulled for the head to drop into a trough that was in front of the horse, thus dropping the coin into the trough what also the bottom had opened in when the leaver was pulled.
- A man in a boat on a chest, with a whale on the other side. The man is holding a boy in his arms above his head and the coin is placed on top of the boy, then man is then pressed and the whales mouth opens and moves closer to the boat a little and the boy is pushed by the man into the whales mouth dropping the coin into the chasm and into the box for storage.
- Two frogs, one big one and one small one, the coin is placed on the belly of the small frog and the head of the large frog is pressed causing an action that opens the large frogs mouth and then causes the little frog to kick his leg in a swinging action kicking the coin into the mouth of the large frog.
These are sort of unique as a lot of thought has went into creating these items that cost something like 40cents to 3 dollars each, what is also a little bit of a cost in the 19th century compared to today.
