In TV dramas, we often see such a scene, when they are in business, they will put the silver they earn in their mouths and take a bite. Why, isn't he afraid that there are bacteria everywhere on it?
In fact, the main reason why they did this was because in ancient times, there were no anti-counterfeiting measures for coins at that time, so they could only check with their teeth, because if the silver was real, it would definitely leave their own tooth marks on it. Although it may seem uncivilized, as long as it is certain that the silver is real, I believe it is better than anything. Besides, biting with your teeth is not licking and sucking silver, so there will be no big problem.
However, if you want to say that the action of biting silver is only fictional in the TV series, in order to strengthen people's impression of silver, then you are very wrong, because the ancient people in real history really had the habit of biting silver, and the purpose of their biting silver is also to test the authenticity of silver.
However, biting silver is not the only method used by the ancients to test money, when it comes to the method of biting silver, the most frequent use is still during the Republic of China, during the Republic of China, the mainland silver production increased significantly, so the custom of using silver dollars to trade gradually increased. Earlier, in fact, most people still rarely use silver dollars to trade, because the price of silver dollars is very high, and copper coins are more popular currencies.
At that time, there would be a little more gold bites. Because in ancient times, gold was more likely to be counterfeited, the texture of gold was soft, the color was biased towards copper, but the price of gold was very high, and if you did not bite, it was difficult to distinguish the authenticity.
But silver is different, silver only sterling silver and miscellaneous silver, these two kinds of silver because of the different amount of silver, so there will be deviations in color, miscellaneous silver color is darker than pure silver, and the color is relatively rough, with a long time will be black, and pure silver is different, his surface will be more lustrous, and even if it is used for a long time, it will not be black. , so the two are easy to distinguish between true and false.
In fact, in ancient times, there are many ways to check money like this, although people do not have developed anti-counterfeiting technology, they can still use their own wisdom to ensure the fairness of transactions.