![]() ![]() The team also discovered that notes printed by Franklin’s network have a distinctive look due to the addition of a translucent material they identified as muscovite. But Manukyan and his team found evidence that Franklin was including colored silks in his paper much earlier. The invention of including tiny fibers in paper pulp - visible as pigmented squiggles within paper money - has often been credited to paper manufacturer Zenas Marshall Crane, who introduced this practice in 1844. This pigment is also different from the “bone black” made from burned bone, which was favored both by counterfeiters and by those outside Franklin’s network of printing houses.Īnother of Franklin’s innovations was in the paper itself. Their analyses revealed that although Franklin used (and sold) “lamp black,” a pigment created by burning vegetable oils, for most printing, Franklin’s printed currency used a special black dye made from graphite found in rock. The counterfeits, they found, have distinctive high quantities of calcium and phosphorus, but these elements are found only in traces in the genuine bills. Manukyan and his team determined the chemical elements used for each item in Notre Dame’s collection of Colonial notes. One of the most distinctive features they found was in Franklin’s pigments. Subscribe to Technology Networks’ daily newsletter, delivering breaking science news straight to your inbox every day. ![]() The tools enabled them to get a closer look than ever at the inks, paper and fibers that made Franklin’s bills distinctive and hard to replicate. Manukyan and his team employed cutting-edge spectroscopic and imaging instruments housed in the Nuclear Science Laboratory and four Notre Dame research core facilities: the Center for Environmental Science and Technology, the Integrated Imaging Facility, the Materials Characterization Facility and the Molecular Structure Facility. Using the techniques of physics, we have been able to restore, in part, some of what that record would have shown.” “But the ledger where we know he recorded these printing decisions and methods has been lost to history. “To maintain the notes’ dependability, Franklin had to stay a step ahead of counterfeiters,” said Manukyan. In response, Franklin worked to embed a suite of security features that made his bills distinctive. There were no standardized bills in the Colonial period, leaving an opportunity for counterfeiters to pass off fake bills as real ones. Unlike gold and silver, paper money’s lack of intrinsic value meant it was constantly at risk of depreciating. ![]() When Franklin opened his printing house in 1728, paper money was a relatively new concept. However, one major problem stood in the way of efforts to print paper money: counterfeiting. Most of the silver and gold coins brought to the British American colonies were rapidly drained away to pay for manufactured goods imported from abroad, leaving the Colonies without sufficient monetary supply to expand their economy,” Manukyan said. “Benjamin Franklin saw that the Colonies’ financial independence was necessary for their political independence. Manukyan explained that the effort to print money for the fledgling Colonial monetary system was important to Franklin not just as a printer but as a statesman as well. The Colonial notes span an 80-year period and include notes printed by Franklin’s network of printing shops and other printers, as well as a series of counterfeit notes. The research team, led by Khachatur Manukyan, an associate research professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, has spent the past seven years analyzing a trove of nearly 600 notes from the Colonial period, which is part of an extensive collection developed by the Hesburgh Libraries’ Rare Books and Special Collections. Benjamin Franklin may be best known as the creator of bifocals and the lightning rod, but a group of University of Notre Dame researchers suggest he should also be known for his innovative ways of making (literal) money.ĭuring his career, Franklin printed nearly 2,500,000 money notes for the American Colonies using what the researchers have identified as highly original techniques, as reported in a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ![]()
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