William J. Crowder (1997, 1124, 1127) states that 'The Fisher hypothesis represents one of the oldest and most basic equilibrium relationships in financial economics... The Fisher equation encapsulates the simple relationship hypothesized to exist between nominal interest rates and expected inflation first delineated by Irving Fisher (1930), whose name has been associated with the equation ever since.' Crowder's first sentence is indisputable. The other sentence quoted presents a belief that seems almost universal in the literature on the Fisher relation (as distinct from the history of economic thought literature about Irving Fisher). It credits Fisher with one of the few innovations in the area for which he does not deserve (and did not claim) credit, neglects what he did contribute on related topics, and views The Theory of Interest (1930) as his first presentation of the relationship, a third of a century later than his classic reformulation of the relation. The celebrated equation, which appears in Fisher's American Economic Association monograph Appreciation and Interest (1896) and in an appendix to his The Rate of Interest (1907), does not appear in The Theory of Interest (where the treatment of the relation in chapters 2 and 19 is verbal, supplemented with diagrams but no equation). In Appreciation and Interest (1896), Fisher drew attention to statements by William Douglass, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, Jacob de Haas, and John Bates Clark of how expected inflation or deflation affects nominal interest, and he made no claim to originality on the point. Writing at the end of a thirty-year period of declining prices, Fisher referred in his title to appreciation of the purchasing power of money, rather than to depreciation. Fisher was the first to write down the relation as an equation, but not the first to articulate the relation. While endorsing