10 Things You Always Wanted To Know About Money

4: What's the one stock investment that you should have made when you were younger?

The editors of Money magazine provide a pretty good answer. In their recently published 30th-anniversary issue, they identified the 30 best-performing stocks of the past 30 years. The winner? Southwest Airlines. If you had bought $10,000 worth of Southwest stock (at $3.88 a share) 30 years ago, then your investment would be worth more than $10 million today. It is a remarkable growth story. Back in 1972, Southwest's first full year of operation, it had a fleet size of exactly three planes. Today, the company has 375 airplanes and more than 400 new aircraft on order through the year 2012.

"We're right back to where we were in 1990, when the airline industry was just hemorrhaging red ink," says Southwest's CFO, Gary Kelly. "We were profitable then; they weren't. We're profitable now; they're not."

- Christine Canabou

5: What's with Andrew Jackson's hair on the $20 bill?

Fast Company is about style as well as substance, so we had to ask. "He had a wonderful mane of hair!" raves Angie Brannon, proprietor of Angie's Hair Designs, a salon near Jackson's home, the Hermitage, in Nashville, Tennessee. "It was very stylish for his time, and it fit his long face." (She would have trimmed back the wild eyebrows though.) Says Leon Yarusi, a hair stylist for 46 years in Allenhurst, New Jersey: "He has today's look, an I-don't-care look. Like, 'This is my hair, it's me, this is who I am.' "

But in other portraits, the nation's seventh president wasn't quite so glamorous. Most reveal a face gaunter and more angular. Thomas Sully's 1820 painting, the one that's used on the $20 bill, "was by far the most romantic and handsome portrait," says Robert V. Remini, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of The Life of Andrew Jackson (Harper Perennial, 2001).

- Keith H. Hammonds

6: Why are there so many ATM machines?

Because they make so much money for banks. According to the latest figures from Bankrate.com's semi-annual survey, Americans spent $2.3 billion in surcharge fees at ATMs that they used outside their banks' networks. That comes to $6,534 a year in revenue for every ATM in the United States. And the $2.3 billion doesn't include fees that banks charge us for using a "foreign" ATM -- which could total another $1 billion.

(Side note: According to David Gosnell, senior editor at ATM & Debit News, only three countries permit ATM surcharges: the United States, the UK, and Canada.)

The surcharges have had a huge effect on ATM ubiquity in the United States. Since surcharges became legal in 1996, the number of ATMs has increased by more than 200,000, to a total of 352,000. Banks and other institutions have installed more ATMs in the past six years than in the previous quarter century. (The first U.S. ATM was set up in 1971, at a Citizens & Southern National Bank branch in Atlanta.)

These days, ATMs outnumber bank branches by more than four to one. Cruise ships have ATMs. The U.S. Navy started putting ATMs on warships in 1988 to make cash accessible to sailors, and 144 ships now have them. Americans do more than 1.1 billion ATM transactions a month -- which breaks down to 26,000 transactions a minute.

Perhaps the most remote U.S.-related ATM is operated by Wells Fargo Bank. It's located at McMurdo Station, a U.S. base in Antarctica. It's so remote that Erick Chiang, head of polar research support for the National Science Foundation, offers the ATM's coordinates when you ask, Well, where is it? "It's about 78 degrees south, longitude 166 degrees east," he says.

Chiang, who has been to McMurdo several times, says that the ATM is connected to the big global networks with McMurdo's full-time satellite link. "It even operates during the winter months," he says, when the station is cut off from the rest of the world and staffed by just 250 people.

- Charles Fishman

7: Why don't we get rid of the penny?

The fate of the country's oldest (one-cent pieces have been circulating since 1787) and arguably most useless (sorry, Abe) coin has created a remarkably contentious battle over the past few years. In 2001, Representative Jim Kolbe submitted legislation to get rid of the penny on cash transactions by rounding up or down to the nearest nickel. He argued that pennies are a hassle to handle and to use, for retailers and for customers alike. Retailers, for instance, end up paying about 60 cents for a roll of 50 pennies because of wrapping charges.

For now, though, Americans seem to want to hold on to their pennies. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. residents say that the Mint shouldn't retire the coin. And the Mint has no plans to change the game. Last year, it stamped out 7.3 billion pennies, more than half of its total coin production. More important, the penny is still profitable to produce, according to U.S. Mint spokesman Michael White, who says that each penny costs eight-tenths of a cent. In 2001, the Mint's total profit on the penny was more than $24 million.

- Christine Canabou