How America Prints Its Money: From a Civil War Basement to Billions of Notes

0:00 · The six people who started it (1862)

August twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-two. Washington, D.C. Beneath the south wing of the Treasury Building, six people go to work around a steam engine that was not there a week ago. A clerk named Spencer Clark. One male assistant. Four women. Their job is not to print money. Not yet. Their job is to cut it. Today, all of America's paper money comes from just two buildings, in Washington and in Fort Worth, Texas, where every note is born under as much as twenty tons of pressure.

A hundred-dollar bill costs about eleven cents to print. The rest is something no press can print: confidence that no one else can make it. How did six people in a basement become a factory for billions of notes a year? What are the two small letters on some of the bills in your wallet? And when a dollar wears out, where does it go to die? This is the story of how America prints its money.

1:17 · Civil War: why the Treasury started making money

To understand how, we have to go back to eighteen sixty-one. The country is at war with itself, and it is running out of money. Gold and silver coins disappear from circulation. People hold on to them, because metal keeps its value in a way that promises do not. Washington answers with paper. In eighteen sixty-one, Demand Notes become the first paper money the federal government puts into general circulation. The first ten-dollar note carries a portrait of President Abraham Lincoln.

Then, on February twenty-fifth, eighteen sixty-two, the Legal Tender Act authorizes one hundred fifty million dollars in United States Notes, lawful money for nearly all debts, public and private. There is one problem. The government has no printing plant of its own. The notes are engraved and printed under contract in New York, by the American and the Continental Bank Note Companies. They arrive in Washington in sheets of four.

In Washington, officials sign them. Then about seventy-five women separate and trim every sheet by hand. With shears. For fifty dollars a month each. The work is slow and expensive, and one man at the Treasury is convinced a machine could do it better. Spencer M. Clark is chief clerk of the Treasury's Bureau of Construction. He has already experimented with two hand-crank machines for trimming and separating. He takes the idea to Secretary Salmon P.

Chase. Chase tells him to proceed with trials of steam-powered machines to trim, separate and seal the notes. The written order, dated August twenty-second, eighteen sixty-two, spells out the stakes. It is "not issued as a permanency." If the machines are not more economical and better than the old method, "its use will not be continued." And Clark is to "keep a perfect record at every step." Within six days, Clark has a steam engine, a boiler and machinery in place in the southwest room of the basement.

Then he writes the sentence this whole story grows from: "On the twenty-ninth day of August, eighteen sixty-two, I commenced the work with one male assistant and four female operatives." At first, they handle twelve thousand impressions a day. By January eighteen sixty-three, thirty-six thousand. In eighteen sixty-two, Congress also authorizes the Treasury Secretary to engrave and print notes inside the department. The little shop keeps growing.

By eighteen sixty-four, Clark reports more than five hundred workers, and days when more than sixteen million dollars passes through their hands. But in the spring of eighteen sixty-four, the shop runs into a different kind of trouble.

4:14 · The 1864 Treasury scandal and the Garfield committee

On the floor of the House of Representatives, a congressman accuses the Treasury of something no ledger can disprove. His name is James Brooks, a representative from New York. The Treasury's printing operation, he tells the House, has led to the sacrifice of "millions and millions of the public money." And the Treasury Department, he says, has become "a house for orgies and bacchanals." The House does not laugh it off.

On April thirtieth, eighteen sixty-four, it creates a select committee of nine to investigate. Its chairman is a first-term congressman from Ohio, James A. Garfield. And one of the nine members is James Brooks himself. Sixteen years later, Garfield will be elected President. That spring, his committee takes testimony through May and June, and on June thirtieth, eighteen sixty-four, it reports back in a volume of nearly four hundred pages.

The charge, the majority concludes, is "wholly unwarranted by the facts." No evidence shows "that a single dollar has been fraudulently issued." Printing in the Treasury has "very greatly reduced the cost of manufacture," and it keeps the plates and dies in the government's own hands. The committee also offers its own explanation: the charges were, in part, an effort "to break up the plan of printing in the Treasury Department." Not everyone agrees.

Four members sign a resolution declaring Clark "an unfit man" to run the bureau. Brooks is one of them. But the line that lasts is about the women. The charges, the majority writes, have compromised "the reputation of the three hundred females employed in the printing division." "A majority of them," it adds, "are wives or sisters of soldiers who have fallen in the field." Clark keeps his job, and the shop keeps adding work.

With coins still scarce, the Treasury has been issuing Fractional Currency: paper notes of five ten twenty-five and fifty cents. It is the first currency produced entirely at the Treasury Department. That is where Clark's next controversy comes from. It is smaller, and stranger. In eighteen sixty-four, a five-cent Fractional Currency note appears with a portrait on it. The portrait is Spencer Clark's. Even the Bureau's own history says it is unclear how it got there.

The reaction is clear enough. In eighteen sixty-six, Congress bans the portrait of any living person from the nation's currency, bonds and securities. From there, the basement becomes an institution. In eighteen sixty-nine, it begins engraving and printing the faces of United States Notes. For fiscal year eighteen seventy-five, Congress funds, for the first time by name, a "Bureau of Engraving and Printing." And in eighteen seventy-seven, the Bureau begins printing all United States currency.

In eighteen eighty, it moves into its first purpose-built home, at fourteenth and B Streets. In eighteen ninety-four, it starts printing postage stamps too. The first one it issues is a six-cent stamp honoring President Garfield. In nineteen fourteen, it moves into a larger building. In nineteen twenty-nine, every note shrinks by about thirty percent. And in the early nineteen nineties, American paper money is printed outside Washington for the first time, in Fort Worth, Texas.

Today, that plant produces more than half of the nation's currency order. But a factory is only as good as what goes into it. And the material American money is printed on is not what most people picture.

7:47 · What dollar bills are made of, and how they are engraved

U.S. currency paper is seventy-five percent cotton and twenty-five percent linen. Scattered through it, at random, are tiny red and blue fibers. They are there, the Bureau says, "to make imitation more difficult." The paper is made for the Bureau by one company, Crane Currency, in Dalton, Massachusetts. It is illegal for anyone other than the Bureau to possess it. For the five-dollar note and up, the paper carries more: a watermark and a security thread, made into the sheet before any ink touches it. It is built to last.

According to the Bureau, a note can take about four thousand double folds, forward and then backward, before it tears. Then there is the ink. The Bureau formulates and blends its own. Every note, whatever its value, has a green back. Why green? The Bureau's answer: the pigment was available in large quantities, it resisted chemical and physical change, and green was "psychologically identified with the strong and stable credit of the government." Paper and ink keep evolving.

In nineteen ninety, a security thread and microprinting arrive, first in the Series nineteen ninety hundred-dollar notes, to deter counterfeiting by advanced copiers and printers. In nineteen ninety-six comes the first significant redesign in sixty-seven years. And color returns. The last note printed with a background color had been the twenty-dollar Gold Certificate of Series nineteen oh-five. The next was the redesigned twenty-dollar bill, on October ninth, two thousand three.

All of that sets the stage. But the oldest defense on a dollar still begins with a human hand. Every design starts as ideas and rough sketches from the Bureau's banknote designers. Then it goes to the engravers. They cut the portrait on the front, the vignette on the back, the ornamentation and the lettering. Each engraving is a network of fine lines, dots and dashes, each one varying in size and shape. Up close, a face on a dollar is a field of tiny lines.

Engravers still use traditional tools, alongside digital technology. The grooves are cut into steel dies. The dies are transferred and processed into working printing plates. Each plate is inspected, repaired if needed, cleaned, polished, and finally chrome-plated for hardness. A century ago, the same chain was already on film. In nineteen twenty, a Ford educational film recorded it inside the Bureau: an engraved die, its image carried onto a steel roll, and from the roll onto the plate.

Why keep something this slow in an age of digital printers? Because the logic was set in eighteen sixty-two. When the Treasury Secretary was authorized to print notes in-house, the designs combined fine-line engraving, intricate geometric lathe work, a Treasury seal and engraved signatures, all, in the Bureau's words, "to aid in counterfeit deterrence." But an engraved plate is only a promise. The moment it meets paper, under twenty tons of pressure, is where a dollar actually begins.

10:58 · How money is printed: offset, intaglio and the 50-note sheet

Currency is built in layers. Each printing method leaves its own fingerprint: how the ink leaves the plate, which inks are used, how they sit on the paper. Security is built in at every step. Layer one is color. Every denomination except the one and the two starts on an offset press, which prints the face and the back of a sheet at the same time.

These are big machines: more than fifty feet long and more than seventy tons. The Bureau runs three in Washington and four in Texas. About every five hundred sheets, an operator pulls one out and examines it, checking that the colors and their alignment hold. The printers have a word for that alignment: registration. Layer two is the one you can feel. Intaglio. Ink is spread over the engraved plate, then wiped from its surface so it stays only in the grooves.

Paper goes on top, and the two are pressed together, hard. The ink is pulled out of the grooves onto the paper, leaving an image that stands slightly raised. When it dries, the Bureau says, it feels like fine sandpaper. It is used on high-value documents, currency and parts of passports among them. On a dollar, it carries the portrait, the vignette, the scrollwork, the numerals and the lettering. Today's intaglio presses weigh fifty-seven tons each and print with up to twenty tons of pressure.

They can run ten thousand sheets an hour. The backs go first, in green. Then the sheets go into a vault to dry for three days. A single work-in-process vault may hold fifty to one hundred million dollars in unfinished notes. Then the faces are printed in black, and the sheets wait another three days. At any given moment, the Washington plant alone may have up to three hundred million dollars moving through production.

The sheets have grown with the Bureau. When the smaller notes arrived in nineteen twenty-nine, a sheet held twelve of them. In the nineteen fifties, new inks and faster presses raised it to eighteen then thirty-two. On February fourteenth, twenty fourteen, the Bureau completed its first order of one-dollar notes printed fifty to a sheet. One more date belongs here. In nineteen fifty-seven, the year this footage was shot, the motto "In God We Trust" first appeared on paper money, on Series nineteen fifty-seven one-dollar silver certificates.

But before a single note gets a serial number, a machine looks at every sheet. The Offline Currency Inspection System uses cameras and custom software to divide each note into one hundred twenty-five thousand pixels, four million for a full sheet, and inspects both sides at two and a half sheets per second. Good sheets move on. From rejected sheets, good notes are recovered wherever possible. Layer three is identity. A letterpress adds what makes each note unique: two serial numbers, the Federal Reserve seal, the Treasury seal and the Federal Reserve identifiers.

Notes printed as replacements during production carry a star at the end of the serial number. They are known as star notes. And this is where the two letters come in. On the front of every note is a small number: the face plate number. It identifies the plate that printed that side. If that number is preceded by the letters F W, your bill was printed in Fort Worth, Texas. If not, it came from Washington. There is more in plain sight.

A letter-and-number pair marks where on the plate the note was printed. On modern notes, the first letter of the serial number marks the series year, and the second marks which of the twelve Federal Reserve Banks issued it. Every bill carries its own birth certificate, printed on its face.

14:49 · Cutting, packing and shipping cash to the Federal Reserve

Now the sheets meet the blades. On the finishing line, stacks of one hundred sheets pass through two guillotine cutters. The first cut runs horizontally, leaving the notes in pairs. The second runs vertically. For the first time in the whole process, there are individual notes, one hundred to a pile. Each pile gets a band. Ten packages become a bundle of one thousand notes, shrink-wrapped and barcoded with serial numbers and Federal Reserve Bank information. Four bundles make a brick: four thousand notes.

Four bricks make a Cash Pak: sixteen thousand. For the largest bill, that adds up fast. A single brick of hundreds is four hundred thousand dollars. A full skid of them is sixty-four million. Newer equipment folds several of these steps into one: machines one hundred forty-four feet long that examine full sheets, print the numbers, verify, cut and package, all in one line. Then the cash goes into a vault to wait for its only customer.

The Bureau does not decide how much money America gets. The Federal Reserve Board does. Each year the Board projects demand for new currency and places an order. The order for twenty twenty-six, approved and submitted on July fifteenth, twenty twenty-five, calls for three point eight to five point one billion notes, worth one hundred eight point nine to one hundred thirty-nine point six billion dollars. The Board weighs forecast inventories, trends in payments, and one more number: how fast old notes are being destroyed.

In twenty twenty-four, the Bureau produced five point eight billion notes. The Board also pays. It reimburses the Bureau for the cost of production, and it arranges and pays for transport from Washington and Fort Worth to Federal Reserve Bank cash offices. The Board's currency budget for twenty twenty-five: one point zero four billion dollars. Since nineteen fifty-one, the Bureau has received no annual appropriations from Congress for this work.

It is paid for what it makes. What does that buy? Counting paper, ink and labor, a one-dollar note costs four point one cents to print. A twenty at seven point three cents. A hundred at eleven point three. And a design anyone can check with eyes and fingertips. Take the current one hundred, first issued on October eighth, twenty thirteen. Tilt it, and the bells in the blue ribbon change to hundreds. The bell in the copper inkwell shifts from copper to green.

Hold it to the light, and a faint portrait of Benjamin Franklin appears in the blank space. To the left of the main portrait runs a thread that glows pink under ultraviolet light. Run a finger down Franklin's shoulder. It feels rough. That is the intaglio. Every one of those features is published openly. The point is not secrecy. The point is that anyone can check.

17:59 · Where old money goes to die, and what never changed

But no note stays new for long. From the day it leaves the vault, every dollar is on a clock. At the end of twenty twenty-five, there were fifty-six point six billion U.S. paper notes in circulation. The most common is not the one.

It is the hundred: nineteen point nine billion of them, against fifteen point two billion ones. Their lives run very differently. The Federal Reserve estimates that a one-dollar note lasts about seven point two years. A five, five point eight. A twenty, eleven point one. A hundred, twenty-four years. And demand has not collapsed. Between June twenty twenty-four and June twenty twenty-five, currency in circulation grew by zero point eight billion notes, or forty-three point one billion dollars.

When banks deposit cash at the Federal Reserve, notes that fail its quality criteria are declared unfit. The law requires that unfit notes be canceled, destroyed and accounted for. Inside the Reserve Banks' cash departments, the process has a one-word name: "shreds." It was not always shredding. A nineteen fourteen photograph in the Library of Congress shows the Bureau's destruction committee filling maceration cylinders with canceled money: four million four hundred forty-seven thousand five hundred dollars destroyed at the moment the picture was taken.

Other photographs in the same series show the pulp made into board, and weighed for baling and sale.

Some money dies before its time: in fire, water or chemicals, chewed by animals or insects, or decayed after being buried. For those notes, the Bureau keeps a last resort. It examines currency with half or less of the note remaining, or whose value is in question, and redeems what it can, free of charge. It receives more than twenty-two thousand requests a year, worth an estimated thirty-five million dollars. Faster machines, harder plates, smarter paper.

But the job at the center has not changed since Spencer Clark's first day in the basement: to make paper that everyone can trust, and no one else can make. One part of this story the Bureau's presses never fully shut out. By the end of the Civil War, according to the Secret Service, nearly one-third of all currency in circulation was counterfeit. Every thread, every ribbon, every engraved line in this film exists because someone tried to print money without permission.

In November nineteen thirty-eight, a man passed a one-dollar bill at a cigar store on Broadway. He had made it himself. By the end of nineteen thirty-nine, his bills carried a new flaw: under the portrait, "Washington" was spelled W, A, H, S, I, N, G, T, O, N. For nearly ten years, the Secret Service knew him only by the bills he passed. It set no fewer than ten thousand traps, The New Yorker reported.

He stayed free. Next: Mister Eight Eighty, the counterfeiter who misspelled Washington, and the one thing no agent planned that finally ended the hunt. The next case is already on our desk. Subscribe, and turn on notifications, so you don't miss it. If this film was worth your time, like it, share it, and tell us what you thought in the comments.