Given the current economic crisis and the lack of US dollars in Lebanon, on January 31, 2020, Lebanese daily newspaper L'Orient le Jour brought an article on the birthplace of the first US dollars, more precisely the small mining town of Jáchymov in the Czech Republic.

Jáchymov is one of five areas in the Czech Republic registered on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2019.

L´Orient le Jour further states, that in the 16th century, Count Schlick discovered silver mines in Jáchymov and got the idea of minting "Tolar" coins from mined silver. The idea expanded to neighboring and even more distant countries, and so Tolar (under derived names) began to be used as a local currency in various European countries. Dollars first came to America with the arrival of the Dutch and when the United States gained independence, tolar, renamed to the dollar, became the official currency.

In 1898, physicist Marie Curie visited Jáchymov and found that the ores used to produce the first US dollars contained two radioactive elements - radium and polonium. Thus, Jáchymov was not only the birthplace of world currency, but at the same time he was also at the birth of nuclear weapons.

You can read the full article published in L´Orient le Jour here: https://tinyurl.com/tp4nnnf