Harry Stephen Keeler 16 min read

A single dollar, left to compound for thousands of years, swells until it owns the entire Earth, a lesson in the terrifying arithmetic of interest, delivered in the year 3221.

Harry Stephen Keeler's 1915 story is a witty, mind-expanding social-SF classic about compound interest run amok. Clever, prophetic, endlessly reprinted. Read it for a famous little tale that turns a schoolroom math trick into a startling vision of the far future.

In its time

Published in 1915, during the 1910s, lost worlds and interplanetary adventure.

Reading it

16 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).