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Re: American Dollar Coins
American paper money is as uniform as it is for a relatively simple reason : at one time in US history, as much as two-thirds of the paper money in circulation was counterfeit.
The uniformity of design was aimed at for many years & finally imposed for good in 1928, because it was felt that using similar designs across all denominations, & the same design across all types of the same denomination, for many years, would make people more familiar with the currency & less likely to accept counterfeits. Coloured overprints & underprints, which had been seen on US paper money before then, were also abolished because of the "false sense of security" problem — being eye-catching, a well-done overprint would distract the receiver from noticing a fairly crude counterfeit.
Previously, there had been so many different designs even of government-sponsored currency in circulation (counting many different series of United States Notes, National Bank Notes, Silver Certificates, Gold Certificates, Treasury Notes of 1890, Federal Reserve Notes, & Federal Reserve Bank Notes) that any kind of strange-looking paper might be accepted under the impression of its being a legitimate note the receiver simply had not seen before.
The uniformity in size has essentially always been there. The first government paper money, in 1861, was made by the American Banknote Company of New York, the most prominent of a large number of currency printers in the country at that time, and it was printed on the same size "blanks" as all other ABNCo notes. This size was determined by the paper used for currency printing, which normally had four notes of the same size printed on one sheet. The reason for this is that it was customary at the time, when printing the denominations for which there was less demand, to prepare a plate for two of each kind, or three of one kind & one of the other. Naturally, then, all the denominations had to be the same size. Although the overall size was reduced in 1928, to cut printing costs, the uniformity remained. The only important exception was the Fractional Currency, notes from 3 to 50 cents, which circulated in the 1860s and 1870s.
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