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Put in short, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing is where all United States paper currency and several other paper goods for the government are manufactured. Incredibly important to our capitalist society, this bureau is kept one of the most secure and, if not completely, quite secretive about its habits. We shall, over the next several hours for me, several minutes for you, go over this process, and how it came to be. The United States Bureau of Engraving and Printing was created on August 29, 1862. In a single basement room in the building of the Treasury, the bureau was created in order to issue paper money, which, during the Civil War, would be more resistant to counterfeiting than the gold and silver coins used. In 1894, they took over production of U.
S. postage stamps, which they continue to manufacture now. The BEP has also, in its time, produced currency for China, Siam, Korea, and the Philippines, all work for which it has been paid. In the past, the Bureau has printed denominations up to $ 10, 000, today still considered legal tender (Treasury, 1). ?
The process of making paper money begins with manufacturing the paper. Denim (the kind used in blue jeans) and other types of cotton are mashed to a pulpy consistency, then bleached and treated with chemical baths then heated to turn it into usable pulpy slurry. The cotton pulp is then rolled and squeezed to expel all moisture until it is thin and dry enough to be used as paper. Immediately after the process of rolling, the watermark is pressed into the paper in a process known only to a few people. Also in this process, the anti-counterfeit plastic strip, dyed various fluorescent shades, is added.
The fluorescent dye makes the strip reactive to black, or ultraviolet, lights; an easy way to tell a counterfeit bill from a fake one. There are red and blue strands scattered randomly throughout the paper, creating red, white, and blue bills. This also helps to determine counterfeit bills; those without the small strands are counterfeit (Discovery). Printing the bills cannot even begin until their plates are engraved. Engravers at the BEP work tirelessly to engrave sheets of steel with the exact design of the bills, without serial numbers, color-shifting ink, or micro printing. They also have to engrave the plates backward so that the bills are printed correctly.
For security purposes, no one engraver works on each bill. For each feature on the bills (portrait, scroll work, letter work, and vignette) there has to be a separate engraver. In this way, no one person would be able to reproduce the bill for a counterfeiter. The master plates are then reproduced into sheets of 20 bills each by an independent company (Discovery). Now, as the paper has arrived and the plates are set, printing may begin. The plates are first inked for a full ten minutes, making sure that they will not run dry during printing.
Then sheets of paper large enough to create 20 bills each are fed through the printer. The fronts of the bills are printed first, then the backs. This keeps the focus on the front of the bills. The color-shifting ink is next applied in a secret process. The final step in printing is to stamp each bill with its serial number and the seals of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve System. The letters on the serial number indicate the branch of the Federal Reserve Bank that requested the currency.
The numbers act like an identification code, and are unique to each bill. The bills are then cut into stacks of 100 bills, in which state they are left until they are shipped to the branch of the Federal Reserve that requested the currency (Discovery). The deterrence of counterfeiters is one of the top priorities of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. The anti-counterfeiting measures that the BEP have come up with will be highlighted below. The most famous anti-counterfeiting measures are found only in the $ 5, $ 10, $ 20, $ 50, and $ 100 denominations. The easiest of these to spot, in the newest versions of the bills, is the color of the bills.
Shades of peach, green, and blue can be seen in new versions of the $ 10, $ 20, and soon the $ 50 bills. This forces simply copying the bills to be much more difficult. Next is the aforementioned watermark. The precise watermark cannot be replicated by any home-generated means, meaning that any bill higher than a $ 5 note without a watermark, which can be seen by holding the bill to the light, is counterfeit. Another measure used is a small plastic thread running through the bill. This, like the watermark, can be seen by holding the bill to the light.
It bears the letters USA $ (denomination) and then a miniature American flag, then reversed to be able to be read from the backside. These threads are also dyed fluorescent colors; they will glow when exposed to a black, or ultraviolet, light. Color-shifting ink is also a highly effective method of deterring counterfeiters. This ink, found on the $ 20 bill and newest $ 10 bill, when tilted, shifts color between green and black.
When this type of ink is copied, it loses its distinctive sparkle and simply turns black (Discovery). Microprinting can be found most easily in the $ 20 bill. In the lower-left 20, if one looks closely, they can see USA 20 engraved incredibly small into the number. These characters are too small to be picked up by most commercially available copiers.
Also, it is possible to see extremely light hexagonally shaped lines throughout the bills (Discovery). All of the above-mentioned anti-counterfeiting measures are absent on the $ 1 bill. This is simply because it would cost too much to redesign such a low-denomination bill that no one really wants to bother counterfeiting anyway. In fact, the bill has remained unchanged for decades, aside from the signatures of the Secretary of the Treasury and the Treasurer of the United States. I certainly hope that you may know at least a bit more than you did twenty to thirty seconds ago about the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and its products. It has been an absolute pleasure ( cough bore cough ) to write morning / afternoon /evening or whatever time it happens to be now.
Let us hope that you do not encounter another bureau of the government because you tried to contradict the measures that the BEP tries so hard to implement: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Works Cited Bureau of Engraving & Printing. U. S.
Treasury. September 29, 2006. web Various Titles Unknown. Discovery Channel. Unknown Dates.
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