March 2016 - How (not) to Make Money
Members of the Horndean & District U3A met for their regular monthly meeting on Friday 4th March at Merchistoun Hall where they listened to fascinating talk by Paul Chapman.
Paul's knowledge comes from the time he was employed by De la Rue who printed money for many countries around the word. He was involved in the design of machines that could identify counterfeit bank notes.
He explained that there are two types of money, one intrinsic (like gold) and the other being token (of no material value). There would not be enough gold etc in the world to use as currency and also the value fluctuates so it was therefore established that token coins and banknotes would be issued. However, there has to be trust in the issuing authority and trust that the tokens are genuine. Paul told how trust was lost in the Zimbabwean currency which gave rise to raging inflation by a factor of 1,000 in six months!
To ensure that our currency is genuine it was necessary to change from pure design to design and technology to include features that machines could identify - paper and features. The paper used for our bank notes is re-cycled cotton and old mail bags used to be used. During the last war the Germans printed counterfeit English bank notes with the intention of dropping them over England to de-stabilize our banking system. However the scheme never took off because they had made the notes from pure cotton which could easily be identified! Pure cotton is non-acidic, absorbs ink readily and is UV dull.
The features and quality of print is all important to prevent forgeries. There are random dots, micro printing on lines and words, squiggles made up of words, colours that change on the bird, uv features - invisible ink which can be read by ultra violet light. The watermark of the Queen is now more detailed. The silver thread, which can be coded, is fully embedded and weaves in and out of the paper. There is a motion thread in £50 notes. The brown ink on the £10 is intaglio printed and never fully dries out
Each year around £12million counterfeit notes are taken out of circulation. There are 3 billion £ coins in circulation with about 1 in 30 being counterfeit. This year our new bank notes will be made of plastic and will contain a new set of measures to prevent forgeries.
Members were enthralled by all the facts and intricacies of producing our bank notes and the many anecdotes Paul interspersed during his talk. Many questions were posed to him. A truly enjoyable talk.
Diane Stoner, Speaker Co-ordinator.