Tonight on NOVA, the American dollar bill, the most commonly forged document in the world.
Even skilled counterfeiters have rarely fooled the feds for long.
But what about modern laser scanners and color copiers?
Instead of having one person counterfeit a million notes, there'll be a million people
counterfeiting one note.
Will new technologies tempt more people to try their hand at making a dishonest buck?
Funding for NOVA is provided by Lockheed, a bold new force in systems engineering, management
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the financial support of viewers like you.
People take for granted the fact that they're carrying a little work of art around their
pocket and they never look at it properly, they glance at it, but if they take it out
and look at it, they can see how beautiful it really is.
The way the overall composition just formulably presents itself almost like a stage, you can
almost imagine that these scrolls are the curtains at the side of the stage and here
is Benjamin Franklin presenting himself as the central character.
Well the design is absolutely perfect as far as currency goes, it's a beautiful design,
I believe it's won several awards over the years.
Elegant American engraving, monochromatic, basically worn colorantallium as an identity.
This old master has a unique position in the world.
As the planet's most popular piece of paper, it is also the most commonly forged document.
There's pressure to change the design, but the greenback's entwined in the American soul.
Any meddling with this ancient icon could have repercussions everywhere.
There are approximately 150 billion dollars worth of United States cash in circulation
around the world, that's roughly 12 billion physical pieces, works out to about 30 dollars
in cash for every person on earth, the numbers are really staggering.
Money making is a closed world, its secrets carefully guarded.
The impossible dream of all money designers is to create unforgeable currency, they strive
to make each stage of the manufacturing process as complicated as possible to imitate.
But the dollar is becoming vulnerable, many printers of high security documents believe
the simplicity of its design makes it the easiest note in the world to counterfeit.
The Federal Reserve is always on guard against pollution of the money supply by counterfeits.
If a bad bill slips through the commercial banking system, then it should be intercepted
here.
Every day in its New York branch, the Fed processes over 8 million used notes.
Most notes are reissued, the remaining third, the old and dirty ones, are shredded.
Mechanical sorters filter out any counterfeits, the ink on a genuine note carries an optical
and magnetic signature, which is recognized by the machine's scanners.
Any rejects are sent to the Secret Service.
They are stored in the vaults of its Washington headquarters.
This is a month's haul from New York City.
Last year, the total number of counterfeits reached a world record of 132 million dollars.
It's a crime no longer restricted to skilled craftsmen.
Advances in desktop publishing and color copying have opened the way to a new breed of amateur
counterfeiter who is much harder to catch.
Around the world, national banks are becoming quietly alarmed at the threat posed by this
machine.
Counterfeiting has become an international business and the dollar the prime target.
Holland, with its tradition of excellence in the graphic arts, has produced many skilled
counterfeiters.
Derek Shurman's job is to track them down.
He heads an anti-counterfeit squad at the Netherlands Criminal Intelligence Bureau.
When a new note enters circulation, he checks its pedigree.
Where else has it been seen?
Is it a new counterfeit or a leftover from an old batch?
Are there any clues in the printing which might lead to a known suspect?
Is the phone all from?
Yes, Derek Shurman speaking over here.
I've got some counterfeit dollar note, perhaps I can send it over and you can make an indicative
of it.
A video fax link with Interpol gives him access to any intelligence on this bill.
Every counterfeit is classified by minute differences in the appearance of the treasury
seal.
It's the one part of the dollar printed in two colors and is the most difficult feature
to copy.
The Secret Service keeps specimens of every counterfeit.
Somewhere in these files will be the work of Mike Landrys.
Landrys comes from the old school of craftsmen who grew up with the smell of printing inks.
His father was an engraver and he became a master printer in New York.
Although he's a reformed man today, 30 years ago he got caught with green fingers.
In his book, I Made It Myself, he describes how he was lured into this clandestine world
by a mafia gang with an urgent print job.
I was arrested for counterfeiting in 1964.
I happen to be regarded as one of the lucky few in American history who wasn't sent to
jail because of some mitigating circumstances with the Secret Service.
In the over 40 years that I have been a printer, I have never once met a cameraman in this
industry who hasn't at least once put a Federal Reserve note in the copy board of his camera
for the purpose of shooting a negative.
This in itself is a felony, except that I'm going to blow it up 150 percent to conform
with Federal regulations.
After shooting the negative, the magic begins.
And you watch a beautiful, fine line, elegant engraving coming up at you gradually with
this red safe light around, your heart starts to beat.
And it's a weird thing because you're surreptitious, you've entered some kind of criminal adventure
that doesn't even seem like a crime, and as he becomes clearer and clearer and elegantly
defined, that is almost analogous to reaching orgasm.
To continue the process, Landrys would transfer the negatives to light-sensitive printing
plates.
But first, he must obtain good negatives.
Separating the green treasury seal from the word 50 printed over it is always difficult.
For obvious reasons, the tricks of his technique cannot be devolved.
If I had realized, of course, at the time, what it can do to your life, I never would
have attempted it.
And my advice to anybody who keeps thinking about that, just don't go beyond shooting
the negative.
If you get through shooting the negative, put it in the tray of Clorox and watch it
all bleach out and wind up with a clear piece of film, and you'll wind up with a clear mind.
Counterfeiters have always been quick to seize on new graphic arts technology.
This is a high-definition laser scanner.
It's used to produce printing plates for commercial artwork, but machines like this have also
traced the fine-line detail of the dollar bill.
Such expensive laser scanners are inaccessible to most counterfeiters, but they are becoming
smaller, cheaper, and more widely available.
Okay, Mike, let's see what we've got here.
Let's focus in and blow up the section with the treasury seal over prints, the word 50.
Once again, they home in on the treasury seal.
For the laser scanner, it's an easy target.
There we go.
That's great.
That's astounding.
It took me more than a week to fool around with manual masking and blow it up and reducing.
To make printing plates, the digitally stored images are fed into a machine next door.
It produces better quality plates in a fraction of the time, but a press is still needed to
print the money.
Well, as far as all the new robotics and laser scanners and everything that we're experiencing
in the last 15 years, I don't think that'll have little or no effect on a traditional
printers.
That's basically the same method and the temptation is the same.
All it does is save a little bit of time, but the other technology that's out there,
these color photocopiers, I think it just widens the potential.
It makes the potential much larger.
It seems so easy to do, and if the same temptation is out there with more machines and more people
who aren't even printers, I believe that is a potential threat.
Everybody must realize it's the same felony to stick your federal reserve note into one
of those photocopiers for the purpose of reproducing it.
Still a major crime.
The quality of image from a color copier is startlingly good.
The toner on the paper even has the feel of banknote printing.
If it's a little bit yellow, so we just knock down the yellow, it would also knock down
a little bit of the green.
Well, this is the first copy that came off, so that's why it's not an exact match.
What about printing on both sides?
Is that a problem?
It's not recommended, but it's possible.
The company doesn't recommend doing it, so we don't, but it has been done.
I've seen it.
The extent of the problem is that you're going to find more and more people who rationalize
the copying of a banknote is not so terrible.
Our company has been in the business over the last 10 years or so of producing coupons
for a lot of the fast food chains, and the reason why we're in that business is because
the college students rationalize, well, if I've got to go out for supper tonight, there's
nothing wrong with color copying several 50 cent McDonald coupons so I can have supper
tonight.
So again, if I rationalize that the counterfeiting of a one or a five dollar bill, depending
upon the level of inflation, is not so terrible, then instead of having one person counterfeit
a million notes, there'll be a million people counterfeiting one note.
Counterfeiting was far from a casual crime in colonial days.
The first American paper money carried the ultimate health warning.
A less brutal approach was to make bills harder to copy.
The history of banknote design runs parallel with counterfeiting.
One of the most dedicated and most ingenious people working in the battle against the forger
was Benjamin Franklin.
Franklin did a number of things to the notes that he printed for various colonies to try
to make them uncounterfeitable by outside people.
For example, Franklin experimented with paper, putting bits of mic into the paper so that
hopefully no crooked county printer would have that sort of thing.
He also worked with what's called a nature print, which is a real impression of a leaf
done by a special process that Franklin had invented in lead and nailed to a printing
block which would give you a fineness of line roughly akin to an engraving, but you could
mass produce it.
Other things less successful, Franklin on the notes of Pennsylvania routinely misspelled
the name of the colony in hopes that people seeing the notes about to counterfeit them
would decide that the note that they were looking at was counterfeit in the first place
and spell it correctly.
That one didn't work, but the nature print did work fairly effectively as an anti-counterfeiting
deterrent.
Massachusetts was the first colony to produce independent American banknotes.
Paul Revere engraved them in his workshop while Boston was under siege in 1775.
For three centuries, paper money has been made with a special printing process called
intaglio.
It begins with a fine line engraving on a copper plate.
All the patterns and elaborate details are cut into the surface.
It is then inked so that each of the engraved lines will become an ink ridge on the banknote.
The secret of intaglio printing is the enormous pressure on the printing plate which forces
the paper to suck the ink out of the engraving.
The principle is still used today.
The raised feel of the ink and sharpness of image has always been hard to reproduce.
Up to about 1800, most American paper money was printed from copper plates, very much
like this one which dates from about 1815.
Copper was very useful for printing in that it took a marvelous delicacy of line and so
a very clear line.
Fortunately, copper is also fairly soft which strictly limits the number of pulls you can
take from an individual copper plate.
As you can see here, the copper is beginning to wear out and in fact this is why this particular
plate was retired from service.
Every time a plate wore out, the engraving had to be duplicated by hand.
Inevitably, no two plates were absolutely identical and this created a problem.
It became hard to distinguish genuine notes from counterfeit notes.
The solution was siderography, a craft developed at the beginning of the 19th century.
It's a way of producing exact copies of a steel engraving.
Under tremendous pressure, the original engraving is rolled onto a soft steel cylinder.
After hardening, these steel rolls with their raised image can be used again and again every
time a new printing plate is needed.
Another important advance in deterring crooked engravers was the invention of a mechanical
doodler.
It was almost impossible to reproduce by hand the complicated patterns drawn by a geometric
plate.
By the middle of the 19th century, banknote printing had become a booming business.
The biggest manufacturers amalgamated to form the American Banknote Company, which produced
thousands of engravings.
The old dies and rolls are remnants of an era when every bank issued its own notes.
Picture engravings could be combined with text and border patterns to produce individual
notes for different banks.
The notes became symbols of the hopes and aspirations of each state, a reflection of
everyday life.
These elegant works of art were ruthlessly copied.
By the time of the Civil War, over a third of the currency was counterfeit.
In 1861, the first national bills were issued to try to save the economy.
The first products of the United States government in the war between the states were called
demand notes, and from the back of each note, which was printed in a green, the notes became
known as greenbacks, and they still are known as greenbacks.
Federal paper money is still known as greenbacks.
Within two years of the first greenbacks, there were nearly as many counterfeits as
genuine notes.
The dollar was losing its credibility.
Something had to be done.
Shortly before he was assassinated in 1865, Abraham Lincoln created a group of special
agents called the Secret Service.
Initially, their role was not to protect presidents, but to safeguard the economy by tracking down
counterfeiters.
Many people were arrested.
Counterfeiting became a dangerous activity, and the treasury agents, the T-Men, gained
a tough reputation.
The warnings they provided 50 years ago are still true today.
Uh-oh, what's this?
Some new kind of wallet?
Yes, these boys will bear watching.
This young lady, knowing her money, pretends she has no change and calls the manager.
Examine the treasury seal.
You will find the points on the genuine are sharp and clearly defined.
On the counterfeit, they are broken off or dull.
Remember instruction.
Delay the passer under a pretext.
I wonder if they would have taken the chance had they known that the maximum penalty for
passing one counterfeit note is 15 years imprisonment in a federal penitentiary and a $5,000 fine.
Instead of improving the design of the dollar to make it less easy to counterfeit, the treasury
department has continued to rely on its special agents.
Today, the big halls come from organized crime and drug cartels.
When a new counterfeit appears, a forensic investigation begins.
By running a magnet over the bill, they can see whether the ink can be magnetized.
If it's genuine, a distinct magnetic spectrum should appear.
This bill fails the test.
Genuine currency, which is made from cotton, does not fluoresce under ultraviolet light,
whereas most counterfeit currency, which is often made from wood pulp, contains bleaching
agents which do fluoresce.
They try to work out where the paper comes from.
The paper is one of the most difficult features of a dollar to imitate.
Using a system of stain analysis, it is possible to determine the type of wood and origin of
the paper.
If certain types of bamboo fibers are present, for example, it might suggest the paper comes
from the Far East, where there has been a big increase in counterfeiting.
To confirm the identity of a counterfeiter, fingerprints can be lifted from banknotes by
spraying with ninhydrin, a chemical which reacts with the amino acids secreted from
fingertips.
Heating with a steam iron stains prints purple.
Sometimes, the only way of seeing a fingerprint is to examine it under a laser.
In cases where it is hard to link the printer to his illegal tender, a polaroid snap of
his fingerprint can provide the crucial evidence needed in court.
Well, there's two or three profiles of the typical counterfeiter.
The one that probably jumps to everyone's mind is the totally dedicated artist stuck
away in the back room who toils night and day for his entire life with almost an artistic
goal to produce a perfect counterfeit note.
We have seen that person, that profile, we're familiar with it and it does exist, but thankfully
for us, that's a very small group of the type of people who counterfeit.
Ellsworth-Rostin fits into the category of the artist type, a serious artist who is striving
and, in my view, will always strive to improve his counterfeit product until he produces
a counterfeit note that is undetectable.
He started counterfeiting probably over 25 years ago and at every opportunity that he's
been a free man and when it's been available to him to have the equipment, he counterfeits.
And he's not in it strictly for the money, he's in it for the challenge, for the game.
Quality is your security.
Quality is a reflection of you as a person, your ideals, how you view life.
I'm a perfectionist, I'm an idealist also and whatever I produce as a finished product,
it must shine for me as an individual.
It must be the best that I can produce under the conditions that they were produced.
While serving a prison sentence for robbing an antique coin dealer, Ellsworth-Rostin decided
to teach himself how to make his own money.
By the time he was released, he was a walking encyclopedia of printing.
Without ever having smelled a developer or tested an ink or had my hands-on equipment,
I was still able to acquire the knowledge necessary to leave the institution and set
up a print shop and I printed one dollar bills at that particular time.
As my first experience, I was leery or afraid of doing anything larger because I had no
experience, I didn't know how well they'd be accepted.
It was a silver-slipper restaurant in Roxbury, Massachusetts at about 7.30 in the morning.
I ordered scrambled eggs and sausage for breakfast and I laid the bill with others on the counter
and the man came by to pick up my money and my heart was beating fast and I was really
in another world and he accepted.
And then on, my confidence in that particular so-called profession grew and my interest
grew and my devotion to it grew.
These are early examples of Mr. Rostin's work.
We have his 20 and his five here.
Both these notes were produced by the offset process and basically they're very poor notes.
The 20 is a little better than the five, not much.
In 1973 in the summer, I was distributing counterfeit five dollar bills in Hartford.
It was Saturday morning, I went into a tobacco store selling exotic tobaccos and as I was
giving one of the five dollar bills to the proprietor, another gentleman was in there
and to my surprise, I was introduced to this man and I come to find out as I was handing
the five dollar bill to the proprietor that this man was the mayor of Hartford.
That was a shocking experience.
Here I am committing a crime with one hand and shaking hands with the mayor with the
other.
About ten years later, we have examples of his hundred.
It's produced by the same process, same equipment.
He's much improved in his skills though.
This is a relatively successful note, especially on the East Coast.
I can't give you an exact figure, but I think he was in the five figures, but I'm not positive.
In 23 years, I've manufactured 1,201 dollar bills, most of which never got into circulation.
About 60,000 dollars worth of five dollar bills, 10,000 of that actually got into circulation.
And 20 dollar bills, 300,000, most of which got into circulation.
And finally, 100 dollar bills, about 58 million total printing, maybe five or six of that
millions actually got into circulation over this 23 year period.
Raustin has been in prison many times for counterfeiting.
He says he's a reformed man, but now that he's released, the secret service will be
on the lookout.
Like most counterfeiters, he used an offset press, which in the right hand can produce
convincing results.
Using confiscated presses, the secret service teaches its agents how to counterfeit.
In some cases, this helps their investigations.
With new technology, especially the color copier, leaves few clues.
Traditionally, counterfeiting has been, for the most part, a vertical business.
You have to invest in a press, you have to have a human engraver, you have skilled artisans
working for you, and you have a distribution network.
In your manufacturing operation, you've got costs of goods sold and you want to run a
profit margin.
That's the vertical model.
Casual counterfeiting is making counterfeiting into a horizontal activity.
That creates very special problems for the enforcement officials, because conspiracies
are very easy to catch, because people can't keep secrets, and pretty soon you can follow
a trail back to wherever the counterfeiting is occurring.
But if someone only makes one counterfeit bill and successfully passes it, there may
be no way to find that person again.
If the nature of counterfeiting is changing, perhaps it's finally time for the greenback
to change too.
The Ten Lizzie's had a good run for over 60 years.
Bob Luver, the former head of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, led a task force to
investigate the problem.
After spending millions of dollars on research, he was frustrated that the Treasury stonewalled
any proposed design change.
I think everyone recognized on the task force that a radical change such as a design change
was eminently necessary, and I think a design change incorporated the use of color.
However, as the proposal went forward, and ultimately only went to the secretary, it
had, in a sense, it was watered down.
It was recognized it would be very difficult to get a radical change through the political
administration beyond the Treasury Department, or even up on the Hill, and consequently,
I think the political people began to think, what is the best deterrent that we can add
to the currency that the Federal Reserve System would agree to, but yet would not affect a
major change in design?
This is the new U.S. note, it's a $100 Federal Reserve Bank note with two additional security
features.
The first feature is a polyester thread that runs from top to bottom on the left side of
the note, that is completely invisible to reflected light, but in fact can be seen by
transmitted light.
The fiber has the denomination USA 100 printed on it.
The second feature we're using that is a change in American currency is small micro-printing
around the portrait.
In this area here, you can see a small script that reads the United States of America around
the portrait.
Under color copier technology, that will become a solid jagged line and the script will drop
out.
The introduction today of the new thread and the currency, that's going to take 10 or 12
years before there are sufficient bills out there in circulation, let's say in the 20s,
50s and 100s before they have the impact, the desired impact.
A more radical design change could take even longer.
Could a hologram be stuck on paper currency?
It's an idea that's been around for 20 years.
Holograms are an excellent device, particularly when used on credit cards because they're
on a solid substrate.
We researched holograms for currency.
The difficulty is that a hologram on currency must pass a crumple test.
And that's true of whether we're using ink or anything else, that you've got to be able
to crumple that bill approximately 30 or 40 times to show that it would last.
In this case, after approximately 2.6 crumples, but this is what happened to it.
Any proposed change must survive the worst excesses of the official torturer of bank
notes.
Deep in the labyrinth of the bureau, he subjects notes to the most diabolical treatment.
Greenbacks must stay green in the harshest detergents and resist shrinkage in the hottest
wash.
This is the dreaded crumple test that crushed the hologram.
The tightest fist could not inflict such damage.
And every time, George must retain his stiff upper lip.
The buck must survive acid baths, noxious solvents, and exposure to the equivalent of weeks of
intense sunlight.
But this is nothing compared to what the public does to its money.
Just down the corridor, they resurrect old notes.
A dollar is a dollar, no matter how badly soiled, burned, or mutilated.
If this department can salvage any remnants, the cash can be redeemed at face value.
We get cases that have been chewed by dogs, horses, pigs, and termites is the most popular
of them.
The claimant did not indicate in their correspondence that this was eaten by termites, but because
of years of experience and the characteristics of a general termite case, we're able to
ascertain that this was eaten by termites.
The examiner is actually going to go through and duplicate each note.
What I mean by duplication, she's going to choose one area on this blob of currency here,
and I suppose that what she will actually do is take the corners, and she will go through
and just paste down each corner.
If she gets five corners duplicated in the same spot, she will automatically know that
she has five, five dollar bills.
This is about one of my worst cases I ever had, right, and it was cut up by an old lady
about 80 years old.
I don't guess she had anything else to do, so she just decided to cut the money up.
With these little pieces that I have, I'm going to have to put them together for a portrait,
and so far I don't know exactly how much I have, but I have quite a few portraits.
She says she had $3,000.
These five fragments of Franklin will be exchanged for $500.
This man's dollar bills can be worth hundreds of times their face value when redeemed and
in an art gallery.
Stephen Boggs draws his own money.
I was in Chicago in 1984, and I was having the American bottomless cup of coffee and
drawing away a number one on a napkin, and the waitress was admiring it, and she asked
if she could have it, and I said no, and then she offered me money for it, and I still said
no, and she walked away very dejected and very unhappy, and I felt bad for having made
her unhappy.
So when she came back, I asked her if she'd accept it as payment on this 90 cents worth
of coffee and donut, and when she said yes, I became happy, she became happy, people around
us became happy, and we started talking about this thing, money, and how it works and what
it does for you, and then on my way out, she insisted that I take the change, a dime, which
I put into a frame and still have, and think about it every time I see it.
Boggs never pretends his bills are genuine.
He presents them as works of art.
Indeed, the transaction itself becomes the art.
Hello, I'm told this is on sale for $75.
$75 an hour, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm an artist.
Oh yeah?
I made this $100 bill myself.
Did you?
Yes.
Oh sure, we'll take it anyway.
I'd like to spend it with you, if you would give me the receipt and the change, I'll sign
this on the back.
Do you have identification for that?
I don't have any identification.
It's just a piece of paper.
I made it myself.
It's not legal tender.
In business, it's very legal.
It's not legal tender.
We're out of the barter stage, and that was back, like you grew the corn, and we grew
the rice, and we needed corn, so we swapped, but it has no value.
Well, I agree with you that it has no value, but it has worth.
I'm afraid that won't do it.
I don't think it's worth $100 then.
Well, I could draw you a picture of this, and you can use that, okay?
I might come back then.
Is that a good enough deal?
Okay.
Thank you very much.
In exchange with you, my $100 bill for its face value for the two fans, and I get the
receipt and the change back in exchange for my work of art, which I named.
On the fifth attempt, success.
The bill was accepted at its face value.
Although, if the store owner is lucky, an art collector might drop by with an offer
he can't refuse.
A Boggs bill displayed with the paraphernalia of purchase can fetch a fair price.
Boggs has narrowly escaped prosecution in Australia and Britain.
His subversive activities may have injured the pride of some national currencies, but
he's not a financial threat.
This note was designed to subvert an economy.
It was probably made by the CIA during the Vietnam War.
As a pilot with Air America, the unofficial CIA airline, Bob Wofford became involved in
what appeared to be government-backed counterfeiting.
From a base in Vien Chien, he flew missions into communist-held Laos.
Sometimes, instead of dropping food supplies, he was releasing sackfuls of counterfeit money.
It was part of an economic destabilization campaign.
He flew over the capital, the path of Laos capital of Samnua, and circled for about fifteen
or twenty minutes while the bags of money were dropped out.
The bags had a fuse on them, an explosive device, which was supposed to rip the bag
open after it left the aircraft.
All exploded prematurely, and the money was scattered all over the aircraft.
So when we got back to Vien Chien, we had to sterilize the airplane, and that's when
I picked up these notes, and that's pretty much what they are.
These are four hundred kip notes, two hundred kip notes, and fifty kip notes.
Cleaned the airplane up and went home and had a martini.
Economic warfare is not a new idea.
It's been tried many times before.
Lake Toplitz in Austria and the end of a long search which for years puzzled Scotland Yard
and the international police.
Down there at the bottom of the lake are boxes of printing plates and notes, the clue to
what must be the biggest forgery of all time.
Hitler had them made during the war to undermine Britain's economy by flooding the country
with counterfeit money.
Expert forgers released from concentration camps did the job, and what a job.
They produced three hundred and fifty million counterfeit pounds.
The SS sank the lot together with the plates towards the end of the war.
Fourteen years later they'd been found.
Some of the boxes broke up and the fibers came up in handfuls, fistfuls of fibers.
To stem the invasion, the Bank of England brought out a new fiber with a metal thread
in the paper, but this only dealt with the immediate threat.
Eventually, the oldest serving banknote was replaced with the first multicolored five
pound note.
Since the war, the bank has changed the design four times in its effort to stay one step
ahead of the counterfeiter.
It's always a serious threat, I mean, it's a very fundamental danger in a modern society
which rely on paper money, that there should not be widespread forgery.
If it ever reaches the stage that it undermines confidence in the currency, you have reached
a dangerous state of affairs, and we regard it as an absolutely prime priority of our
responsibilities to keep this to the minimum.
After years of research, the Bank of England issued the first of a new series of notes
in 1990.
They were designed to combat the color copier.
Alastair McCullen, one of their scientists, had to work out ways of beating this constantly
changing technology.
He still pays incognito visits to trade fairs to keep up with the opposition's latest developments.
Obviously with this one you haven't got as many features as your CLC-1, the copy quality
is now a lot better on this machine, it's now up to 400 dots per inch by 400 lines per
inch.
Would it be possible for you to copy an original that I've got too?
Yes.
I don't think it'll present too much difficulty.
For the first time, the choice of colors in a new banknote would be partly determined
by how they reproduce on a color copier.
On the color copier, there are controls which enable you to alter color balance, but what
we've tried to do is to choose colors in combination so that if you increase the blue on the copier
to reproduce that accurately, then you upset the color balance somewhere else on the note.
The insipid green color on the back of the note was found to be the most effective weapon
against the copier, and there's another trick centered on the eye of the portrait.
In the portrait is a series of concentric circles printed in fine lines centered on
one of George Stevenson's eyes.
And what happens when you either copy this note on a scanner or on a color copier is
that these fine lines interfere with the scan lines on the scanner or the copier.
Before designing the new notes, the bank carried out a long series of psychological studies.
In some tests, they recruited the modeling services of the general manager's secretary.
They concluded that the bigger the portrait and the less obvious the numerals, the greater
the chance of being able to spot counterfeits.
Places have a unique quality, even slight printing imperfections are very noticeable.
A key aspect of the new design is the use of larger portraits.
The portrait of the queen still requires the traditional skills of fine line drawing and
engraving.
The work is meticulous.
It was two years before the queen's portrait was judged perfect.
The complete set of banknotes would have taken over 10 years to produce.
Although they incorporate the latest technology, the backs of the notes depict great men of
the last century and look curiously old fashioned.
In Holland, they adopt a more modern approach, abandoning historical figures altogether.
The celebrated Dutch designer Oxenar paved the way in the 70s by experimenting with bright
primary colors.
In the beginning, when I started with banknotes, I saw all these banknotes everywhere in the
world.
You see that here too, the French, the Italian, the Chinese, they were very muddy in color.
The only banknotes that really inspired me, in fact, was play money, like the monopoly
money.
And that is what I think is necessary for banknotes to make things that you can easily
see what you have in your hands.
You can easily see they're very clear, they have a clear typography, they have a clear
color.
They're also easy and practical to produce and they're very well protected.
But I think what you can see also is that I made them, they are from a person.
I have a personal style of doing and I like that.
That's what I don't see so much in American banknotes.
The dollar has a form of the last century and it doesn't say anything about the country
of today.
Like Britain, Holland redesigned its banknotes every 15 or 20 years.
The latest series is being designed by a young avant-garde video artist called Jaar Drupstein.
He has produced a completely abstract design, an extension of the monopoly money school.
But behind the bright colors are several innovations to guard against the color copier.
Drupstein also used colors which did not copy well.
People have always tried to make the unforgeable note, of course.
So it's of course my ambition as well.
The problem is that counterfeiters, their knowledge and their technical possibilities
increase very much.
So we have a hard time to stay ahead of them.
The 25 gilder note has many unique security features.
It is the first note in the world to carry a barcode.
The serial numbers of every note are automatically recorded before they are distributed.
This enables the Netherlands bank to keep track of every note.
Any counterfeit bearing the same barcode would be quickly intercepted when the notes are
reprocessed.
Hidden in the new note are the usual secret security features known only to the bank.
But for the first time it also carries a very public counterfeit alert.
Printed on the note is a three-point checklist which allows people to confirm the note's
authenticity for themselves.
One is the red robin in the watermark, second the layer of tactile ink on the front is feelable,
and third held against the light we see a tulip and a wild rose because the front and
the back fit exactly.
The old dollar looks decidedly dowdy alongside its colorful compatriots and its lack of security
is legendary among banknote printers.
Perhaps the buck is long overdue for a facelift.
I think if I had the opportunity to design a note, at least conceptually, on the right
side of the note I might put the numbers at the top and the bottom in Arabic.
I put a large portrait and to the left side of the note I put a watermark.
Most banknotes carry a watermark in the paper which can only be seen when held up to the
light.
It's still one of the most effective security measures against all forms of counterfeiting.
An English company called Portals produces banknote paper for over a hundred different
countries.
Cotton is the main ingredient which gives banknotes that crisp texture.
Paper for the U.S. dollar is made by Portals' arch-rival, Cranes, who add linen and good
American denim to toughen up the buck.
Outside the U.S., Portals has the edge over Cranes because of its success in mass-producing
watermarks.
The process begins with a wax engraving.
The more wax that is scraped away, the lighter the image appears.
This wax mold becomes the template for the watermark.
Thousands of wire mesh impressions of the portrait are stitched together in sheets and
wrapped around huge drums.
By dipping these cylinders into a slurry of cotton fibers, each wire mesh template leaves
a watermark.
While the paper is still a wet paste, metallic or plastic security threads can also be inserted.
So paper can play a critical part in defending banknotes from counterfeiters.
In our hypothetical dollar, the existing security thread showing the bill's value would be retained.
The next important change would be the addition of other colors.
Is the green of the greenback sacred, or does it have a more colorful future?
A Swiss company called SIGPA makes inks for most of the world's banknotes.
The American subsidiary produces rivers of green and black.
Dollar green is actually quite hard to copy, but it would be even harder if combined with
other colors.
The muddy color does not come from a single pigment.
With most high-security inks, it is made from a secret mixture of pigments and binding agents.
I would introduce color, color and design, not so that it's overwhelming, but it adds
to the design and the counterfeit proof, and then use a color design on the back so that
you'd have front-to-back registration.
Then I would look at various optical variable devices.
This Californian company won a $17 million contract from the U.S. Treasury to invent
security devices which would change color when shifted back and forth in the light.
Their scientists produced thin atomic coatings which were deposited on plastic strips in
a vacuum chamber.
The Treasury seal on the experimental note had a good color shift until it was put through
the dreaded crumple test.
So back in California, they had to come up with a new idea.
They stripped off the optically variable layer and ground it into tiny flakes.
The plan was to use them as a pigment to make an ink that could be printed on currency instead
of using foil strips.
Not surprisingly, optically variable ink is very expensive.
But some countries, like Thailand, have already tried it.
There's a subtle color shift in one corner of this giant banknote.
Other optical variable devices are springing up around the world, mainly in high-value
notes.
The crumpling problem has only been partially resolved, although perhaps in the U.S. some
of these garish designs might fail the taste test as well as the crumple test.
So this is a blueprint for a new dollar.
It's not green enough for the gray men of the Treasury, perhaps too tame for the avant
garde.
But it might make life harder for counterfeiters intent on making a dishonest buck.
All right.
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