Congratulations! You have found one of the WORLD FAMOUS Germany Bert Wooden Nickel Travel Bugs!! My mission is simple....to move from cache to cache as quickly as possible.
Please do not keep me since I want to travel far and wide!
If the wooden nickel on this travel bug is missing please contact my owner for a replacement.
Wooden Nickels are part of American history. If an American says to you, "Don't take any wooden nickles", what they mean is be careful of someone trying to rip you off by giving you something worthless.
Wooden Nickels though are not always worthless. In the USA they are sometimes given away as a promotion for a product and the wooden nickel is used as a discount coupon.
Wooden nickels have also been used as real money in the USA for short periods of time.
You can find find more information here -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooden_nickel.
A Nickel in the USA is worth 5 Cents.
Prior to introduction of the nickel, five-cent pieces were very small
silver coins called
half dimes. Due to shortages of silver both during and after the
American Civil War, an alternative metal was needed for five-cent coinage, and the
copper–
nickel alloy still in use today was selected. Numerous problems plagued the coinage of nickels through the middle of the 20th century due to the extreme hardness of the alloy, but modern minting equipment has proven more than adequate for the task.
Nickels have always had a value of one cent per gram (even when special nickel-free versions were issued temporarily during World War II). They were designed as 5 grams in the metric units when they were introduced in 1866, shortly before the Metric Act of 1866 declared the metric system to be legal for use in the United States.
Applying the term "nickel" to a coin precedes the usage of five-cent pieces made from nickel alloy. The term was originally applied to the 1857–1858 Flying Eagle cent and the Indian Head cent coin from 1859 to 1864, which were composed of 12% nickel, 88% copper. Throughout the Civil War these cents were referred to as "nickels" or "nicks" from their metal content. When the three-cent nickel came onto the scene in 1865, the first coin to raise nickel content to the modern 25%, these were the new "nickels" to the common person on the street. In 1866, the Shield nickel was introduced and forever changed the way Americans associated coins made from nickel alloy with a particular denomination. Save for alloy changes during World War II, nickel coins from 1866 to the present have been composed of 25% nickel, 75% copper. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_(United_States_coin)