Benjamin Franklin was so busy as an inventor, publisher, scientist, diplomat, and U.S. Founding Father that it’s easy to lose track of his other accomplishments.
So add one more to the roster: his early work in printing colonial paper currency designed to counter the constant threat of counterfeiting.
Franklin was an early innovator of printing techniques that used colored threads, watermarks, and imprints of natural objects such as leaves to make it far harder for others to create knockoffs of his paper bills. A team at the University of Notre Dame has shed new light on his methods using advanced scanning techniques that reveal some of Franklin’s methods in greater detail—along the way, providing one more reason Franklin appears on the $100 bill….