With those words, Sir Edmund Hillary announced that he and Tenzing Norgay had summited Mount Everest on May 29, 1953.
Everest was named for Sir George Everest who had been Surveyor General of India. The name was proposed by his successor, Sir Andrew Waugh. As the story goes, Waugh proposed the name for the peak since there was no local consensus as to what it was called. Everest himself was opposed to it indicating that it was not a name the locals would be able to pronounce.
Everest has been depicted on banknotes of both Nepal and China. In Nepal, the mountain replaced the image of the king on the face of its notes after the last monarch was deposed. In China, it appeared on the back of the ten yuan note issued in 1980.
Sir Edmund Hillary is depicted on the face of the current $5.00 note from New Zealand. When the note was first introduced in 1992, it was one of the few notes to depict a then-living person other than a monarch or political leader. The mountain shown on the note is Mount Cook, New Zealand’s highest point, which was also scaled by Hillary.
Numismatic Notebook 