A colonial banknote issued by New Jersey in 1763
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American founding father Benjamin Franklin developed paper money innovations long before historians previously thought such methods were in use – and they may have even been useful as anti-counterfeiting measures.
Khachatur Manukyan at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and colleagues analyzed the structure and chemical composition of more than 600 banknotes printed by Franklin and associates between 1709 and 1790. For comparison, they performed similar analyzes on paper money printed by other printers and counterfeiters.
They found that Franklin and his associates began adding indigo-dyed blue fibers and threads to paper money as early as 1739 — more than a century before the invention is traditionally credited with being pioneered by paper manufacturer Zenas Marshall Crane. For the first time, the research also revealed that Franklin used a natural graphite-based black ink to print money, while other printers and counterfeiters at the time relied more on inks produced by burning vegetable oils or charring bones.
“This [coloured fibre] techniques were later used in printing federal dollars, and then other currencies around the world,” says Manukyan.
The researchers examined the chemical composition of the inks, fibers and paper used in Franklin’s printing processes. They also used electron microscopes to study the physical structure of printed notes in great detail process that required the researchers to carefully extract and examine paper money samples hundreds of times thinner than a human hair. They used such small samples to avoid unnecessary damage to the historical artifacts, Manukyan says.
The analysis also showed that Franklin incorporated flakes of the clear mineral muscovite into paper pulp as early as 1754 as a way to bolster the durability of paper money.
The findings “nicely complement Franklin’s hands-on scientific summary of achievements,” says Farley Grubban economist at the University of Delaware and author of The Continental Dollar: How the American Revolution Was Financed With Paper Money.
But Grubb is more skeptical of the idea that these ink and paper innovations were intended to help prevent counterfeiting. He described in colonial America that there were more cases of people counterfeiting coins rather than paper money, and says that large-scale counterfeiting of paper money was a “rarity” at the time.
The most notable attempt at counterfeiting occurred during the American Revolutionary War, when the British copied and mass-produced continental dollars issued by the Continental Congress as “a new type of warfare between states,” says Grubb. But he says Congress has recalled and replaced the bills involved.
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