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JSTOR Daily recently ran a piece on an innovation made at the behest of Ben Franklin: the marbling of American currency.
From JSTOR,
“As long as people have been printing money, there have been others printing fakes. Even with coinage, there seemed to be no way to stop the coin clippers (those who would trim a small amount of the metal from the edges of coins) and various other metallurgical scams. (When Isaac Newton was in charge of England’s Royal Mint, one of his major efforts was to crack down on counterfeiting)...
Marbling, the printing of a marble-like pattern on paper by floating dyes on a water bath, was a technique that had been developed in Persia and India before spreading throughout the Ottoman Empire. When it made its way to Europe, it appealed to both artists and London’s world of financiers, who used it on banknotes and bonds. As historian Jake Benson describes, the idea caught on fairly fast:
Within roughly a century of circa 1600, when Persian artist Muhammad Tahir developed his innovative marbling methods and produced his ubiquitous, intricately combed patterns in India, they were applied as the first polychrome security device on some of the earliest indented paper banknotes issued by the Bank of England in 1695.
Difficult to replicate, marbling was a way to make banknotes and checks unique. When the United States was trying to create its first currency, Benjamin Franklin brought to the table the idea of marbling as a security technique, based on his experiences with “conspicuously colored and indented English financial instruments’ in London. Subsequently, Franklin ‘cleverly utilized security marbled wove papers to safeguard early American paper currency, as well as his own personal checks,” writes Benson. More significantly, he also used the technique to safeguard ‘French promissory notes that financed the Revolutionary War.’”
Ben Franklin’s idea to adopt a centuries old Persian technique may have played an important role in the American victory, given armies like to get reliably paid.
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