Print Mark Currency with airSlate SignNow

Print mark currency

the Bureau of Engraving and printing in Washington DC produces billions of dollars or Federal Reserve notes each year for delivery to the Federal Reserve System throughout the nation the bureau is part of the US Department of Treasury and has currency production facilities in Washington DC and Fort Worth Texas c-span visited the Bureau of Engraving and printing to learn about the process of creating currency and the craft of engraving my name is James Brent I'm chief in the office of engraving and I've been in the office for three years at the bureau for 20 years the Bureau of Engraving and printing is responsible for the development and production of United States currency notes as its primary function or primary mission of the bureau prints and processes billions of United States Federal Reserve notes for delivery to the Federal Reserve System orders are received from the Federal Reserve Board on an annual basis the Federal Reserve ultimately makes the decision on when notes go into circulation that are provided by the Bureau of Engraving and printing the bureau is also responsible for redemption of mutilated currency it's a service that's offered to the general public in which currency that's been mutilated can be returned in and redeemed for the appropriate value established by the Bureau the Bureau is also responsible for updating this is in conjunction with the Federal Reserve Board United States Secret Service updating US currency every 7 to 10 years adding additional security features that to help throat counterfeiting it's it's one of the good things about working at the bureau is it's fascinating to think every day that what we produce here touches everybody at some point in time everybody comes in contact with paper currency and it's just fascinating to be a part of that every day also a good part of working at the bureau is the people there's a great deal of pride in the crafts and non crafts labor personnel that work here my name is Joseph buongiorno I've been with the bureau for about 21 years I'm a plate printer I started out in currency went to stamps we no longer do stamps but I'm now in the miscellaneous Department which we do all a lot of hand printing and we do demonstrations on showing how the money used to be printed from 1862 to 1929 all by hand this is called a spider press we used to have 600 of them they used to be in the red brick building up on the corner at that time we had about 8,000 employees we had six aren't presses each press was manned with two people the printer does all the whole inking process we usually had a lady or somebody else'll in there stay clean to put the paper on take the paper off it's a very time-consuming process when they print it the currency like this back in the eighteen hundreds all the way to 1929 the a good day's work for each printer was like 75 sheets a day print an eight bills on a plate a super day was about a hundred sheets and they got paid feast work if it wasn't good work they didn't get paid for I'm Franklin gnaw and now I'm the historical consultant to the Bureau of Engraving and printing the bureau was interesting in that it was an early employer of of women unlike other banknote companies or other institutions of the time about 50% of the workforce was female and often women were seen as naturally suited to this task as it involved cutting things with scissors and wrapping things up and you know various other 19th century attitudes towards women but they were also once they got inside the bureau they started to do what would be considered hard industrial work they're running presses they are helping printers with their machinery they are are doing things that mostly men would be considered to be the right people for they would do heavy lifting and there was really some tough brutal work that they had to do and very at times bad conditions that of course the 1880 building no air conditioning it's August in Washington and the main press room as everything was done by hand the ink was rolled out the hand the ink had to be heated so every Pressman had a small gas heater so it's August 95 degrees you have about a hundred gas heaters running in there and you're wearing Victorian clothing and you'll survive your apprenticeship but mostly they were if you got inside and to do the work you were paid well and a lot of women and men spent decades in here they would spend 20 to 40 years doing the same job because it was a good job and they got treated well you'll also see even in the photographs at the time you'll see African Americans in various jobs and they are mentioned from the very beginning inside the bureau at the very the very first year or two you would see African Americans in the usual jobs that they could get at the time cleaning things like that but soon they moved into processing roles such as cutting up our currency or wrapping up currency or moving currency around and they would stay here for a long time and start to move into management positions so it was very it's a very interesting place the Bureau it's it's kind of always ahead of the rest of society I'm not sure why that is unless it's because it's closed the world on to its own and different rules apply but it's always been ahead in the hiring of women and minorities and them taking leadership positions within the organization security was very strict and it still is in the early years of the Bureau because you had printing plates currency and such floating around when you got in to work in the morning everybody got locked in you had you did everything inside the building you ate if he wanted to smoke you went up on the roof and you smoked and you wouldn't be let out at the end of the day until everything was accounted for if something was missing you were required to pay for it if currency disappeared you and your mates had to pay for it and that that happened went until I think the early 20th century that was the rule and you'll see on the main building which is across the street from us two terraces where people would spend their break times because they were locked in and it was considered cutting edge technology for the day to have individual terraces for your employees about how many people work here just under 2,000 specifically I think the number is right around 1980 this is a combination of craft and non craft employs these employees are located at we have two facilities there's a facility in Fort Worth Texas which we refer to as the Western currency facility and obviously the facility that we are today is the DC currency facility the old currency order is split between both facilities normally it's about 60% in Fort Worth 40% in DC that varies from year to year depending on what denominations are requested and what the volume of the order is my name is Gary Slaton I'm a bank note engraver here to be of Engraving and printing I'm in my 38th year of service and this is what I do here I inspect and manufacture the US currency plates today I'm just inspecting a new hundred dollar note new hundred-dollar plate this is a real currency plate this is the $100 face nextgen currency that we're in the process of printing now there's 32 notes on this sheet this sheet this prints of 32 note sheet this plate will get approximately 800 thousand impressions off of it before it wears and on a regular basis we continue to make plates ones five 10s 50s 20 hundreds faces and backs so it's inspected four times before it actually gets to the plate gets to the press rather I'm sorry and it's inspected before it's Chrome after its chrome like it is now after it's after it's bent and when it goes on the press so every knows exactly the same but comes from one master die which is a note one singular note and the Secret Service would you know it's very important for them to have every piece of currency exactly the same Duke you know to beat the counterfeiting that goes on in this day and age this play I'll work on about two and a half hours I look at each note line for line cut for cut and make sure that there's no no imperfections in this plate I look at it with this glass here this glass is about a three and a half magnification I will look through it and go over the note and look for any scratches a that could print if they print then that note will that note will have to be taken out the sheet may have to be taken out the pred the plate may have to be taken off the press which is like in any other factory when you shut down the press or you stop working and time is money so um you're looking for scratch is not necessarily imperfections in the lines well the imperfections are the scratches uh yes I'm looking for scratches or any imperfection that may not have worked out in the electrolytic process in the plate making so it's a combination of both those cracks it would ended up taking in ink and they would print this is an intaglio plate which is the main premise of our security it it's below the surface the ink is put in the plate it's rubbed into plate it's polished off by a polishing paper on the polishing wipers on the press and the ink is drawn out of the paper out of the engraving and onto the paper that's where our currency has a tactility to it that's different than regular newsprint paper or magazine paper or writing paper we use 100% linen paper from the creme Paper Company this process is called intaglio printing which is an italian word that means beneath the surface then what we're the reason we say it's beneath the surface because this is a hand engraved fleet one of our engravers across the street took over four months to dig this image into the steel this is just for demonstration purposes then it's a photo of the Capitol which we do a lot of printing on souvenir cards and we sell them over there at the souvenir desk this process is very time-consuming printer takes this heavy base ink covers to complete image over this process I'm showing you you only get one print and then you got to do it all over again for the next one it's a very time-consuming process printer covers to complete image over wood ink as he scrapes the ink off he's pushing the ink down inside the engraving every printer had a ball at his cloth on his press this is actually used in the clothing industry for like hoop skirts and things that's called crinoline it's a very coarse material it has to be coarse just to glide over top the engraving you cannot use no fine material it would pull the ink right out of the engraving just the way to my hand like whoever taught the engraving you can see it cleans most of the ink off of there there's still some ink residue on there it still needs some more cleaning every printer had a ball of this chalk when his press puts that chalk on the palm of his hand what it does it creates a barrier between the polymer in the inka on the plate because now he has to smooth the ink down inside the engraving with the palm of his hand then the rest of the ink residue comes off on his hand he actually polishes the plate with the palm of his hand the engraving now has ink in it it is ready to be printed you're going to get one print and then you got to do the whole process all over again to get another one printer takes the plate positions it in the press where he needs it to be you notice we got the paper in plastic the reason for that is whenever we do in printing we have to take the paper and submerge it in water to soften the fibers in the paper because we only get eleven to twelve hundred pounds of pressure here and it's not enough pressure to push dry paper in there so the water actually softens the fibers in the paper to make it easier to push down inside the engraving printer just takes one sheet places it on the press on top of the engraving all I'm doing is holding the handle around and the prank the pressure is pushing the paper down inside the engraving you get one print this particular engraving has is a photo of the Capitol has 200 people in it has a couple horses dogs carriages it's a pretty impressive engraving every seat that's printed and even today when we do this kind of printing upstairs we print a lot of documents and securities for the White House for every sheet that's printed by hand because you're dealing with wet paper is put on a piece of cardboard a piece of craft paper a piece of cardboard at the end of the day whatever was run on the press we take it out of the cardboard and craft paper putting on fresh cardboard we stack it up and piles put four hundred pounds of weights on it has to sit for at least a week to dry before we can go ahead and print the other side of the money or if we're doing souvenir cards the same process and that's the history of how they used to print the money from 1862 to 1929 and we still do this printing just about every day upstairs roughly how much money is produced here in a given day in amazing about 26 million notes approximately 974 million dollars that are produced every day at the Bureau of Engraving and printing also a little-known fact is over nine tons of ink are used every day and the production of those 26 million notes I mentioned we print probably about five and a half billion notes this year we printed about nine billion notes or so last year at all according to the Federal Reserve's request for how many notes they're going to need the Federal Reserve each year takes a poll or inventory from all of the field banks and they make a determination on what's required for each denomination in any given year based on the requirement for denomination they turn that into a request or an order for the Bureau of Engraving and printing to produce notes we don't produce anything unless the Fed gives us an order to produce we made approximately eight six hundred and twenty some plates in the year 2009 and we had a 98 percent proficiency rating so that split up between six or seven engravers and at different times so we all take our turns doing that this is intertwined within a writ what they call original work like engraving a dye or engraving securities for any of the government agencies Treasury Department or whatever what kind of original work do you do or have you done recently the original work would be the master died for this for this piece of currency we have the face we had this this and what the back would look like and as a letter in script engraver my responsibility is to engrave any lettering any kind of script the signatures anything but the portrait pretty much as our as our responsibility there's a hundred dollar bill coming out in April i underst you just used as an example to explain from A to Z how that happens okay the process of developing a new note or a smarter safer more secure note as we say here starts with research and development it also starts with a lot of work a lot of research in the field through the United States Secret Service and the Federal Reserve Board there is a group actually established the advanced counterfeit deterrent group that makes decisions as a collectively makes decisions on additional features and enhancements based on feedback in the field when it comes to counterfeiting that research and development process can take anywhere from three to five years the Bureau of Engraving and printing has committed to updating currency denominations every seven to ten years to stay ahead of counterfeiting once a decision has been made on all the final features and the Bureau has completed all of the research and development and testing of these features on its equipment the production process begins that production process consists of plate printing which is the actual printing of the image 32 subject image on the back of a blank currency sheet we wait 72 hours and then we print the faces of that same sheet the notes are then inspected at our mechanical exam automated inspection area inspection inspected for any defects these walls that can become in contact from that point after inspection the good notes or good sheets go forward to our overprinting department and at the overprinting department this is where the seals and the serial numbers and the sixteen subject sheets are cut down to individual notes they are also packaged and bundled at this phase of the operation moving from the cope operation the note will then travel to our no packaging area where it's receives a final package this is what we call the cash pack and that consists of sixteen thousand notes in each pack and this is how these are shipped out to the Federal Reserve finally after that final packaging the notes travel to one of several Federal Reserve vaults that we have here in the building where they will stay and to the Federal Reserve places in order for specific denomination of notes we have a set of designers we're all in the same year near local 32 banknote engravers go the designers create the design it would be something along the lines of this from that design the Treasury Department okay's it and if they like it then we go forward and we start engraving a new plate or new dye for whatever whatever the subject could be a note like this because they can take anywhere but from six to nine months to do from scratch which is a single one up piece choose your own quarter-inch steel and from that impressions are made from it by a group called The Sitter ographers that's another craft unto itself sitter ography and they are able to duplicate a note from one to many so that way every single note like I said before is exactly the same everything we engraved was in great backwards we use a tool that's called a graver it basically looks like this the same way mmm a plow might further through the earth and cut a v-shape we're displacing metal that metal in turn is obviously three-dimensional below the surface filled with ink and then use printing purposes Paul Revere used the same tools week that I'm using today let's call it a graver this is called a burnisher this is for taking out scratches or marking something in there's no ink in it no it looks like a pen but you can burnish out a scratch by going back over and hopefully repair a plate so it can can be used for printing well these are variety tools that we use different burnishers different size points different measuring devices gauges this is a flat tool where this is this is it this is a graver which cuts a v-shaped line this this one this this is a flat tool which cuts a bottom square cut line and it's just a different style tool and you can see we have several tools and every one seems to have its own little job it's hard to describe and right off that but every every tool does have its own design for certain applications this here is a stone that's an indian stone and it's used for if we have to scrape something out and re engrave it or repair something this stone is is used quite often this is a burnisher here another style burnish that this burnisher here was given to me by my instructor and he's his father made this burnisher so it's a long line of long line of engraver is using this particular tool that's probably over 100 years old the engraving crafted itself there's there's a lot of there's a lot of family that through years of engraving there was a picture engraver here and he had a father and a grandfather who both had 50 years of service and he has since retired to mr. archer and my father was a plate printer my mother actually worked on a press at the Security Bank met in Philadelphia before my father came here in 1950 my brother works here and several there's several generations of people in a lot of the crafts at the Bureau of Engraving and printing that had relatives and have you know have a history the original engravers actually worked across the street in the red brick building 14th and Independence there and they work by the north light so when they worked by the north light before electricity they worked by the north light on the top floor of the old building there they were facing the north and they had opaque glass in there in the app up to the windows and it would filter the light and they had they worked by natural light so how old is this does this desk about probably hundred years old these benches are old they're old old metal benches and this don't one I've ever had will show you just that this is just an example but we would use a piece of acetate that looks like this we would trace over our model that may look something like this but actual size and we're able to put that down on here by using some transfer wax and you burnish it down from that point forward we draw it in by hand and we get it perfect to where we need it and then you don't cut with the graver and make it a three dimension till the very end so it's all drawn in by hand initially until it gets to the point where it can be cut and engraved to hold the ink but there probably aren't a lot of government agencies that actually produce something we produce something every day and we can kind of measure how good we are or how bad we may be on any particular day with our level of production the quality of our product how much we got done and of course the customer service that we provide to the Federal Reserve Board this bench over here now you can see this plate doesn't tend to look as shiny as that one this plates getting to be ready to and be inspected in in the nickle stage this is pure nickel I can still engrave in this plate I can repair things I can tap up the back to repair a scratch or a bump in consideration to this plate here which is Chrome we were just looking at the hundred dollar faces chrome and you really can't do a whole lot of changes to that the chrome is on there to protect the plate and increases longevity on the presses across the street so there's pure nickel plate you couldn't put an ax press it would get worn out there so what I'm looking at that one in chrome and this one in pure nickel and I can repair this plate much more easily after this plate is inspected it goes through a process which is called pantograph and you can see that in pantograph there's a difficulty received but every note has a number of its own and it's a plate number and in every note that you look at in your wallet you will see it has its own number abcdefgh four quadrants and it'll have a plate number on it for accounting purposes so this also is a much larger plate this is for our SOI super Orloff play presses that we've had put in less several years and this larger bench facilitates me looking at it so even though this dollar designs been around a while we still have to keep making pleats oh yes oh yes we still make plates we have the original die and we have Altos that we continue to make and plates off of those altos the reason the one dollar bill hasn't changed the beer of Engraving and printing is slated to change their currency five demands from the Treasury Department every seven years so we're constantly making new plates and new master plates and new dyes and trying to change things to thort counterfeiting the one dollar note although has not changed because of the lobby for the vendors that they use so many $1.00 notes that they would have to change over millions of machines and so that's one reason people ask why doesn't one get changed we're in somewhat of a head-to-head battle with the the mint with the dollar coin but when was the last time you got a dollar coin did you ever get it and change do you ever see it it's not even enough drawers in a cash register for him so even though long longevity in a dollar coin it is longer than a dollar a dollar note people just do not what they've they've tried it in 1976 you know and in the early 90s they've tried to filter in one dollar coins and replace the notes and it the public just won't take them nothing against a mint we all work for the same people but the one dollar notes very important you handle dollars all the time do you think of it differently you just casually handling like everybody else or you ever stop and think about it sometimes I actually actually look at him the whole amount one doesn't feel quite right I'll tell you don't take a look at it and feel but yeah I get like anything else them but then on the other other side of that we see that people here at the bureau we see so much currency so much all day across in the printing area you may see 32 notes on a sheet stack this high stacks and stacks and stacks up and far as you can see down the hallway but to us is just product I guess if you worked in a donut store you can only eat so many donuts they'd like these but no that's what it's like it it's product in here and its currency outside for us you can learn more about the Bureau of Engraving and printing at money factory gov