Spesmilo


The spesmilo is an obsolete decimal international currency, proposed in 1907 by René de Saussure and used before World War I by a few British and Swiss banks, primarily the Ĉekbanko Esperantista.
The spesmilo was equivalent to one thousand spesoj, and worth of pure gold, which at the time was about one-half United States dollar, two shillings in Britain, one Russian ruble, or 2½ Swiss francs. On 19 January 2014, that quantity of gold would be worth about US$33, £22 British pounds, €24, ₽2137 Russian rubles, and SFr 29 Swiss francs.
The basic unit, the speso, was purposely made very small to avoid fractions: US$0.033, UK£0.022, Russia ₽2.137 and Switzerland SFr 0.029.

Sign

The spesmilo character, called spesmilsigno in Esperanto, is a monogram of a cursive capital "S", from whose tail emerges an "m". The currency sign is often typeset as the separate letters Sm. The character has been assigned the Unicode code point and is included in Unicode version 5.2.

Miscellaneous