Henry Ford doubled the wages of his production-line workers to $5 a day in 1914 -- when gold was (by law) $20.67/ounce (a US $20 gold coin contained just under an ounce of gold, the missing fraction was the seignorage, which paid for the minting of the coins).

With a six-day workweek (the 5-day workweek didn't arrive at Ford -- or most places -- until years later), that meant production workers were getting paid one and a half ounces of gold per week.

Today's gold price (per Kitco) is $2,626.00/oz as I write this.

2,626.00 x 1.5 = ‎ $3,939 PER WEEK x 50 weeks/year (idk if that's the correct number of weeks worked in this case) = ‎ $196,950 / year.

A fifth of a million dollars per year for working on Ford's production line -- THAT's what blue-collar Americans at Ford were making 110 years ago.

seigniorage | ˈsānyərij | (also seignorage) noun profit made by a government by issuing currency, especially the difference between the face value of coins and their production costs.