Scrooge McDuck

It was ony 20 ft. on the cover of that issue. But then again, that’s back when he was keeping his dough in a money* lake.* Naturally, the Beagle Boys soon forced him to find a more secure arrangement…

BTW, the original comics through the 50s and early 60s, the money bin was mostly coins – normal, regular ol’ nickles, dimes,and quarters (well, colored white, anyhow, with grey edges) – with bills here and there. Remember that comics only cost a dime back then, you could buy a new car for under $2,000, etc. So, a binful of change was wealth.

Later, when Barks had retired and painted some oils of the ducks, and when some of the stories were being reprinted, it was clear that a moneybin full of coins just didn’t have the impact. The coins then became gold-colored, so presumably were things like the American Eagle gold bullion that Elvez mentions above.

Don’t know if it’s true biography or a wildly fictionalized ‘based on the life of’ version, but one remembered source from my youth has most of Scrooge’s money bin as bills, paper money.

There was a key plot point where Scrooge challenged the leader of Unreachinstan (or similarly named neighboring country) to take a dive into said leader’s own pile of cash, just as Scrooge dove into his own money bin. Unfortunately for the leader (but just as Scrooge planned) this resulted in severe bruising for the leader, as Unreachinstan’s currency is all metal, without the paper money that cushions Scrooge’s dives back in the U.S.A.

Quercus That conflicts with Ducktales, and many issues of the Uncle Scrooge comic. Scrooge can swim through money because he’s Scrooge. Various people have tried to dive into the Money Bin and none have been able to do it.

True, but the covers were normally done by C.C. Beck and not Barks, so they aren’t canon.

And the splash panel of the comic itself clearly shows the 79 ft gauge to be part of an indoor money bin and not a “money lake.” Whatever that is. :smack:

For the nitpickers and the anal: The cover shown in the cite is the true first. The first three Uncle Scrooge comics were one-shot parts of Dell’s Four-Color series and were numbered accordingly. When Scrooge sold well enough to be given his own title, those comics were reprinted as Uncle Scrooge numbers !, 2, and 3. So FC 386 is the same comic that was later US 1 with the same cover.

Whoa! I remeber that comic. If it’s the smame one it was a whole shitload of dimes. Donald kept selling one at a time to a dealer until Unca Scrooge got wise and gave him a huge bag that would undercut his scheme by flooding the market.

The bit about the bag guys trying to dive into the money and hitting their heads is from “Only a Poor Old Man”, one of the early four-color stories (IIRC). The Beagle Boys (the Terrible Beagle Boys!) had stolen Scrooge’s money, and he lamented that he couldn’t swim in it any more. They said, “Huh?” and he showed them how he used to dive in it like a porpoise, and burrow through it like a gopher, and toss it up and let it hit him on the head. The Beagle Boys say, “That looks like fun!” and they dive head first into the pile of coins … and are knocked out cold.

As the B Boys are being led off to jail, Huey, Dewey, Louie and Donald ask Scrooge, “How DO you manage it?” and Scrooge says, “Well, there’s a trick to it.”

Just how many Beagle boys are there? The scavenger hunt for the Rajah RahRah diamond (I don’t know who wrote it or when) hints at a worldwide organization.

Forget the “real” answer, I’m just surprised that QED answered this question to begin with.

Canonically, it was a family – there was an episode when Pappy got out of jail, and the six brothers celebrated. However, their numbers may have changed over time. And, in any given adventure, only two or three of them may have been out on parole to pester Scrooge.

Carl Barks kept changing things whimsically through th years. As I noted in the earlier thread on Scrooge McDuck vs. Bill Gates Barks gave very different figures for Scrooge’s wealth. Only one was a real amount - although it was an absurd number.

As for the contents of Scrooge;'s vault, it clearly contains a lot of coins. In one story he notes that old coins like “Pine Tree Shillings” are rare because “I’m the guy that makes 'em rare!” It showed him digging down through the vaiult to old barrels full of colonial coins.

Well, in one story you found out how much he couldn’t afford. One of the nephews made a bet, and if he won, Uncle Scrooge would have to pay it.

The amount was based on a standard checkerboard. Put one penny on a square, then two on the next square and then four on the next, then eight, then sixteen, thirty-two, etc. until the entire checkerboard was filled.

Scrooge naturally assumed it would amount to nothing and agreed.

It seems the total sum is quite a bit of money after all, more than Uncle Scrooge could cough up. (I am really bad at math, so if someone wants to calculate the total, I would appreciate the effore!)

Yeah, it’s an old story. Here’s one version with a handy chart for you.
http://ccins.camosun.bc.ca/~jbritton/jbchessgrain.htm

Scrooge obviously didn’t pay attention in math. That’s a classic example of exponential growth. Anyway, think of it as 2^0+2^1+ 2^2+…2^63. Seeing as how just 2^63 is 9.22337203686E18, everything up to that is comparatively peanuts.

Okay, the total, assuming everything went properly, is 1.84467440737E19. Divide by a factor of 100, and that’s 1.84467440737E17 dollars. Call it approximately 184 peta-dollars. No idea what you actually use for the amount (e.g., millions, billions, etc.)

Okay, so according to the link it’s actually 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 pennies. Blast my calculator that’s only good to 12 digits.

I’m not very good at explaining math, but I’ll give it my best shot:

What you get is an exponential function, where every time you double the number of pennies you multiply by two, so you end up with 2[sup]x[/sup] pennies on each square. There are 64 squares, so the number of pennies on each square will range from 2[sup]0[/sup] (1, the first square) on up to 2[sup]63[/sup].

Powers of two are neat in that if you add up a sequence of them going from 2[sup]0[/sup] to 2[sup]n[/sup], the total comes out to 2[sup]n+1[/sup]-1. So Uncle Scrooge would have to put 2[sup]64[/sup]-1 pennies on the checkerboard in total.

That works out to $184,467,440,737,095,516.15, or around 180 quadrillion dollars, if I copied it down correctly.

I seem to remember an episode of DuckTales, probably the movie, where Launchpad asks Scrooge something along the lines of, “What’s more important, your life or a couple of quadrillion dollars?” Not Barks, I know, but I’m pretty sure he used an actual number in the phrase, although I’m less sure of the magnitude. If someone can manage to dig up a tape of the movie, or the script, it might get us as official an answer as we’re going to get.

On preview I see that Johnny Bravo and asterion have beaten me to it. Well, there’s the dollar value anyway if it helps.

That was indeed the movie. My parents taped it for us when it was shown on the TV once, and I’ve bet we’ve still got it somewhere, but I’d have to go find it. In any case, it’s rather academic at the moment, as I’m currently nearly 2000 miles from the tape. However, I believe it was million, billion, or trillion, no higher and definitely not lower. Anyway, that’s when they’re making their escape from that space station or planet or asteroid or whatever it was.

hey, the vault itself was rectangular man, just the door was round. also, are we properly converting the value of gold into duck dollars?

Well, to nitpick your nitpick, the cover on Four Color #386 (with the 20-foot gauge)is by Barks.

Barks was never consistent with his facts, nor concerned about creating a unified narrative.

Don Rosa created a multi-issue biography of Scrooge a few years back, based on what we knew of Scrooge’s past from Barks comics, and was constantly struggling with Barks’s inconsistencies.

Rosa acknoledged that one of his most useful sources was Jack L. Chalker’s an Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck, published in 1974 by Chalker’s own Mirage Press, and based on Barks’ works (with full references and footnotes.
On p. 25 he notes that one figure given for Scrooge’s wealth was $500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.16. It’s the only case I know of where Scrooge’s wealth is given as an actual number (as opposed to “fantasticatillions” or some other made-up figre). It easily puts Scrooge ahead of Bill Gates, and it shows that the amount of money he’d have to pay out on that chessboard scam would be, to him, chump change. It also sounds like a heckuva lot more than “three cubic acres” of money, especially when a lot of it was in coin form, but that’s jst another of those inconsistencies.