The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily.

One of the most ubiquitous forms of payment in the world today is credit cards.

The odds are good that you have one and most probably

have one on your person right now. But how did it come about that you could pay

for something by just giving someone a piece of plastic and who exactly came

up with the idea.

Learn more about credit cards, where they came from and how they work

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. As with most everything I talk about in this show, the idea of credit has a very long history.

The code of Hammurabi, one of the oldest systems of laws in the world, has sections on how to deal with credit.

It put maximum interest rates on loans of grain and silver.

Credit was something that was

dependent upon your relationship with them and your trust in them.

In fact, the word credit comes from middle French,

and it was originally used to mean belief or faith. If you extend credit to

someone it is literally a belief in the ability of that person to pay you back.

This is the way that credit worked for centuries.

An individual store would extend credit to individual customers

based on their relationship and trust.

This sort of system might still exist someplace like a pub or a bar

where a regular might have a tab that they pay at the end of the month.

The system of individual lines of credit being established for individual customers by individual businesses was very inefficient. The process of making credit more efficient

was begun in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with major department stores

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