My parents tell me tales of my great grandparents who didn't trust the banks and probably buried money in the yard near where I live. If they buried it in cash, well, it wouldn't be a very impressive sum today.
That same $1.50 invested at 3%, you'd have... $12.22 today. A little better, but inflation's still pretty rough. You'd have been better off buying that pair of overalls in 1945.
Now, $1.50 worth of gold in 1945 would be worth $57-ish today, so if my great grandparents didn't trust the greenback either, then that theoretical coffee can is worth something. But don't take that as investment advice; the dollar price of gold went through the roof when the dollar was taken off the gold standard (go figure) and that's not going to happen twice.
$us0.005 1857 today
14.04¢ (2014 US dollars)
The problem with this query is, wolframalpha auto detects location and uses the $ currency (if available) in that country. So it only really works in the states, and maybe countries that don't have a $ currency.
Nordhaus documents computer performance improvements on the order of 1 trillon to 5 trillion times "...in constant dollars or in terms of labor units since 1900." During that period, Nordhaus notes that "...there were relatively small improvements in efficiency (perhaps a factor of ten) in the century before World War II. Around World War II, however, there was a substantial acceleration in productivity, and the growth in computer power from 1940 to 2002 has averaged close to 50 percent per year."
Automation really picked up in industry in the period since 1970, which has seen relatively stagnant wages for most of the working population.
The gold standard meant that there was no ability to increase the monetary base (and thus no inflation!) at that time (1890s), causing much bitterness among populists.
The normal way one calculates this is by buying power of those dollars - what could you buy then and what would it cost now.
But really I could have bought a Sub-Mariner comics #15 in mint condition, and it would be worth quite a bit more today.
Assuming Hong Kong dollars for "$"
HK$1.50 (Hong Kong dollars) to | today
(no exchange data available)
* or Eftpos cards, if you're in Australia or New Zealand.