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| The new design for the $100 bill |
When I was planning our trip to Washington DC, one of the top places I wanted to tour was the Bureau of Engraving & Printing AKA “The Money Factory.” There’s a smaller group tour they offer which you can reserve through your US Congress representative or senator’s office and I tried for that.
Well.
If you read my post about touring the US Capitol, you know the response I got from my New York Representative . . . none.
The only other alternative was to line up early in the morning and hope to get a free tour ticket – which we did, waking early and arriving at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing ticket office at 7:30 am.
The line was already long . . . .
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| Waiting for tickets for the “Money Factory” tour |
. . . but I knew we were early enough to snag a tour.
The only place which allows photos is the small information center you wait in before the actual tour begins. It’s here you can see what a million dollars looks like . . .
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| One Million Dollars |
. . . plus learn a little bit about the history of money . . .
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| Displays in the Bureau of Engraving & Printing’s Information center |
The “Money Factory” tour starts with a brief film outlining the multiple step process currency goes through before it is released to the public . . . ink and security features like watermarks, color-shifting inks, and a 3-D Security thread are embedded printed engraved onto the special linen paper, allowed to “cure” for 72 hours, then the sheets are flipped over and the process starts on the reverse side. The sheets are then checked for errors before they’re cut.
In fact, the worst part of the tour was when we watched one of the quality control guys hold up a sheet of $100 bills to the light, tilt it back and forth, call over a supervisor, and then . . . . sob! . . . draw a thick red line through all the bills . . . effectively destroying $3200!!
Everyone in the gallery groaned and wailed – we would’ve taken the “bad” money!
Sigh . . . We then watched the sheets get cut and stacked into thick “bricks” before being packaged. Think it’s now money??
Nope. It’s not money until the Federal Reserve bank “releases” the currency (and its serial numbers) into the public. Then it’s money. And boy, I wish I had some of those $100 bills right now!
You exit into the visitor center where you can purchase some specially displayed “money packets” and even shredded money (both of which we chose not to buy), and then it’s back into the real world where you’ll never look at a dollar bill quite the same way again.
Twitter Travel Trivia: My kids were fascinated by who was chosen to be on each bill. They knew the reasons behind the obvious ones like Washington, Lincoln, and even Franklin ($1, $5, and $100 respectively), but it was the oddball ones that made them wonder why . . . especially the $10,000 note with a portrait of Salmon (yes, like the fish) Chase on it, which also had the distinction of being the largest denomination actually released into circulation.
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| A list of portraits on each bill |
