The money bin is the building where Scrooge McDuck stores the portions of his money he earned by himself. Carl Barks invented the "money swim" in 1950, followed by the "money bin" in 1951.
The money bin was built in 1902, shortly after Scrooge entered the diamond market and could no longer sleep at night because all the money he was storing under his mattress raised his bed too close to the ceiling, necessitating a more suitable storage facility for his money. His favorite pastime is to dive off a springboard into his money and swim through it.
Don Rosa has said that Scrooge had earned all the money in his bin by himself, but not only does the bin's size possibly contradict this idea, in Rosa's Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, he said that Scrooge was traveling around the world, starting businesses and having the money sent home. It is unlikely that Scrooge actually earned that money just when he started the business. In the same series, however, he states that he doesn't keep all his money in his bin. Also, in Rosa's Last Sled to Dawson, he implied that Scrooge McDuck no longer earns money with his "own two hands".
Although the money bin is a twelve-story skyscraper and vault (filled with "three cubic acres" of money), on various occasions it has been pulled around by a tractor, lifted to the top of a mountain, stolen by aliens from the bottom of the ocean, and blasted open with a cannon. The traditional location of the Money Bin is on top of Killmotor Hill. The money bin sits atop Futterman's Fault, a fault line which would prove catastrophic in the event of an earthquake.
The money bin is the victim of repeated assaults by Scrooge's enemies who try to steal his money, such as the Beagle Boys, who are after the bulk of Scrooge's money, and Magica DeSpell, who is after Scrooge's "Number One Dime" (the first dime Scrooge ever earned). To protect against these attempted break-ins, Scrooge has installed the greatest security system in the world to thwart any thought of even trying to intrude onto the premises.
Barks defined the volume of money contained inside as "three cubic acres", but the exact meaning, and therefore the volume, of a "cubic acre" is subject to interpretation by the reader, since an acre is a measure of area, not length, a cubic acre would be a 6-dimensional space of 247,961,850,048,000 feet to the sixth power. A series of blueprints created for a Scrooge McDuck story by Don Rosa state that the money bin is approximately 127 feet (39 m) tall, and 120 feet (37 m) wide. In the story, said blueprints are accredited to an architect named Keno D. Rosa (which is Don Rosa's actual name).
The Norwegian name for the Money Bin is "Pengebingen", and has become regular word in the Norwegian language for a large amount of money or cash.
Russell W. Belk mentions the money bin in Material Values in the Comics: A Content Analysis of Comic Books Featuring Themes of Wealth, where he remarks that Scrooge's "childish fascination with money", where he takes pleasure in diving and swimming in the money bin, might account for Scrooge not being portrayed as a villain. Penelope Fritzer in the article Scrooge McDuck: Postmodern Robber Baron considers it possible for the money bin to symbolize the entire Disney empire.
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Famous quotes containing the word money:
“What money is better bestowed than that of a schoolboy’s tip? How the kindness is recalled by the recipient in after days! It blesses him that gives and him that takes.”
—William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863)