A Hundred Bucks Says You Won't Read This Story
Unless you're more of a player than we think you are, that new hundred-dollar bill coming this fall won't wind up in your pocket very often. But it may be America's most popular export, the most coveted bill in the world. And the story of the new hundred — still made by hand with ancient tools — is the story of American money itself.
>>PLUS: A STUDY GUIDE FOR THE NEW $100 BILL
>>ALSO: A VISUAL HISTORY OF THE BENJAMIN
By on August 14, 2013
PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTOPHER GRIFFITH
The plate: A finished chrome-coated printing plate for the new hundred, thirty-two to a sheet, ready for inking.
Published in the September 2013 issue
Our new hundred-dollar bill, like every other single piece of American folding money, is born in this rotary boiler. It's a perfect sphere, an angry kettle fifteen feet across, spinning high off the ground between two stained concrete towers. Most people swear out loud when they see it for the first time. A network of gears, each tooth the size of a fist, churns away in the darkness behind it. The towers and the gears allow the boiler to spin like a planet, like Saturn, rust-colored with wide rings of black grease. It is hot in its shadow, the steam coming off it like breath, and every surface within twenty yards is either dripping or damp. The boiler feels almost monstrous, a relic of a spitting industrial age, corrosive and mean, and it feels that way especially when it finally stops spinning and its oval maw clangs open, vomiting tons of boiling cotton that hits the floor with a heavy slap. There it is, the earliest, no-bullshit incarnation of cash: piles of raw cellulose cooked to its fibrous essence, as brown as it is white, and scalding. American money is born in a flame.
The boiler is housed in an ancient redbrick mill, built in 1863, tumbling toward the shore of the Housatonic River in tiny Dalton, Massachusetts. The mill is named for a local hero, Captain Byron Weston, but is owned and operated by Crane & Co., makers of fine paper. Today the company is under the stewardship of fifty-three-year-old Doug Crane, the seventh generation of his family to manage the business. (The Crane ledgers, which begin with Colonel Thomas Crane in 1770, include the sale of "13 reams of money paper" to a Boston silversmith named Paul Revere.) Winthrop Crane, Doug's great-great-grandfather, won the first contract to supply the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing with paper in 1879, when the mill was only sixteen years old. Crane paper has been the money in American pockets since.
In the beginning, Crane & Co. made paper from discarded rags collected by stooped men pushing carts. American currency is still made with rags — until the last decade or so, mostly from the trims and off-cuts of denim manufacturers, including Levi's. Paper money wore soft, like a pair of blue jeans, because it was made from blue jeans. But recently, Americans decided they liked jeans that stretched, so jeans companies began adding spandex to their fabric. Money with spandex in it wouldn't be money anymore, which means much of Crane's time is now spent on a global search for waste cotton that wasn't used to make elastic pants.
Today, in a big, windowed room around the corner from the kettle, there are maybe fifty rectangular bales of cotton waiting to be boiled, each weighing about five hundred pounds. They'll be dumped into the boiler by a forklift. This particular cotton was never woven into cloth. It's the shorter, coarser fibers left over from the cotton's combing, still flecked with seeds and traces of earth from Georgia or Egypt — it's impossible to tell. The better cotton has gone to places like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to be made into six-dollar T-shirts; the cotton that otherwise would be thrown to the wind has come here to be made into hundred-dollar bills.
American money also contains linen, which is made from flax. It's finer and lighter than cotton; a same-sized bale weighs only 360 pounds. There are fewer bales of it here, because the Crane family recipe calls for 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen. The linen improves the paper's tensile strength, like rebar does in concrete. It also gives American money a very particular feel.
Most other currencies in the world are made either entirely from cotton or, increasingly, from polymers — plastic — first introduced in Australian banknotes in 1988. The three bodies that oversee the production of American currency — the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the Secret Service — explored using polymers for the new hundred-dollar bill, largely for security reasons. By total value, the U.S. hundred is the most heavily counterfeited single denomination in the world. It is also the closest thing to a global currency, with about 60 percent of them somewhere other than here, making the Benjamin both the most legal and threatened of tenders. But to the great relief of the Crane family and the sweating men who work in this mill, the U.S. government decided to stick with the cotton-linen blend that fingertips across the globe instinctively recognize.
In the late 1980s, a new counterfeit hundred, the most perfect counterfeit yet made, began appearing in circulation. It looked identical to the real thing, betrayed visually, at least, under only the most rigorous forensic testing. (Some minor flaws were visible after enormous copies of the bills were made, but these were probably purposeful. Its makers didn't want to be suckered by their own handiwork.) Although the counterfeit came to America mostly on boats from gangs in China, it was eventually traced to North Korea, where it was believed to have been manufactured by the North Korean government on its own presses. Since then, new generations of the same counterfeit have appeared, including a big-head version, mimicking the redesigned hundred that entered circulation in 1996. This family of bogus notes has been given its own title, one that befits its almost mythical stature: the North Korean supernote.
Some stories about the supernote sound more like legend than fact — like its being laundered by a bank in Macao called the Banco Delta Asia, or several thousand of them somehow appearing overnight in Lima, threatening to tip over the entire Peruvian economy. But there remains one truth in the supernote's history that has never been forgotten: It was first detected at the Central Bank of the Philippines by a teller, given pause only by the same nebulous flaw that betrays the majority of counterfeits. It just didn't feel right.
It just didn't feel right because it wasn't printed on paper made by Crane & Co. in Dalton, Massachusetts. It wasn't boiled in this kettle.
Read more: How Money Is Made - Making of the New Hundred Dollar Bill - Esquire
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