Coin Flipping - History

History

The historical origin of coin flipping is the interpretation of a chance outcome as the expression of divine will.

Coin flipping as a game was known to the Romans as "navia aut caput" ('ship or head'), as some coins had a ship on one side and the head of the emperor on the other. In England, this game was referred to as cross and pile, and on the 19th century California frontier, as Indian or Wheat.

Read more about this topic:  Coin Flipping

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.
    Josiah Royce (1855–1916)

    The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)