Life of a Banknote

The American Bank Note Company and other private contractors initially designed, engraved, and printed banknotes. In 1877 Congress mandated that the Bureau of Engraving and Printing within the U.S. Department of the Treasury take over those duties.

By meticulously cutting extremely fine dots, dashes, and curved lines of varying depths and widths into a piece of soft steel, known as a master die, the engraver produced a very lifelike and three-dimensional image on a two-dimensional surface.

The art of engraving not only brought a unique beauty to the bureau's printed products; it also served a more pragmatic function as an anti-counterfeiting measure.

Employee numbering national banknotes with rotary numbering press.

Staff printing, sealing, and printing charter number and geographical data on banknotes.

Engraver engraving a plate.

In 1868 the OCC's Headquarters staff consisted of 72 clerks, a third of them women. Working under tight security, the clerks cut, registered, bundled, and shipped currency to the issuing bank; once the bank received the cash, each note had to be signed by hand.

By the 1900s, OCC clerks processed, inspected, and counted about 800,000 notes—worth about $4 million—each day.

Quality control inspectors work through silver certificates before serial numbering.

Counters verifying the counts of national banknote sheets.

Staff inspecting and counting banknotes.

Staff removing national banknote sheets interleaved between heavier stock after the ink from the face printings had set.

The Comptroller's office required a vault large enough to store sheets of paper for thousands of active banks and provide working space for several clerks.

Early on, the vault's contents were organized geographically by region and town name. Later, materials stored in the vault were organized by bank charter number.

The large volume of currency shipments each day required OCC staff to follow a rigorous protocol for methodically going through the vault on a rotating basis to pull the needed sheets.

Employee packing trimmed banknotes.

Steel door to vault containing paper for banknotes and U.S. bonds weighed 12 tons.

National banknotes ready for circulation were stored in Vault No. 10. Some $250 million were packed in when this photo was taken.

In the Redemption Division of the OCC, old currency was received and exchanged for new currency.

The agency provided banks with a new dollar for every old dollar submitted.

Expert counters worked to prevent error and loss. The staff went to great lengths to protect the old notes from being stolen; they punctured four holes into some, cut off the corners of others, and ultimately cut them in half.

Committee checking daily destruction of national banknotes.

Staff uses machine to cut banknotes in half.

Employee cuts off lower corners of banknotes.

Canceled banknotes passed through the macerator, a huge steel receptacle that ground them into a liquid pulp, which was rolled out into sheets of bookbinders' board and sold for $40 a ton.

The largest value of banknotes ever deposited in the macerator in one day was $151 million, destroyed on June 27, 1894; it consisted of national banknotes and U.S. bonds.

Destruction committee filling the maceration cylinders with $4.4 million in cash to be destroyed.

Macerator for destroying old and mutilated national banknotes after redemption.

Destruction committee posing with $500,000 of condemned banknotes ready to be destroyed.