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Show FORGERY AS A FINE ART Bank of England Notes Easily Duplicated by Up-to-Date Swindler Bank Olficials Too Conservative to Make Changes. (Special Correspondence.) , OTENTIAL safeguards ,'tD) ot tne Bank of England if I 3 notes are the paper and LuJf penal servitude. The ? k' printing is comparatives, comparative-s, ly simple. Twice with- JEfi? in e Iast twelve K?S5SyJi months the 5 note has TMjf If 1U 1 been, forged with suc-wfmC suc-wfmC cess, and the fetish of ijiJSffci its perfect safety has been destroyed. S.aSi3 Continental money-SS money-SS changers have had their confidence in the bank note rudely shaken. Particularly in France, Belgium, Holland and North Italy is it looked upon with suspicion. Representatives of larga establish- The original sheets contain four notes. They were cut in half, and two notes are printed at a time, and numbered automatically. Then they are cut again, and in the result each note has two rough edges and two smooth. It is said that the bank people know which edges on a note of a given number should be rough and which smooth. At any rate, that could be quite easily done. The information in-formation guides the bank, but does not help the public, who obviously cannot know. ' , Every London bank returns its notes dally to the Bank of England and receives a fresh supply. In this way nearly 50,000 are sent out and received back every day, and bad Victoria Embankment. ments on the Riviera and other places frequented by English visitors have recently come to London to see the genuine notes and discover how they may be distinguished from the false. In London tradesmen are troubled with tlie same fear of forgery, and will not readily accept, a bank note from a customer who is not known to them. , , For three-quarters of a century the bank has been printing the note in virtually the same style, with fine black ink, in a simple design, on pure white paper having a complicated watermark. The forger is a scientist of a sort, and science has advanced while the bank has stood still. Bankers, Bank-ers, bank inspectors whose business it is to deal with forgeries, engravers and bank note printers agree that there is no essential difficulty in successfully suc-cessfully forging the note. The great safeguard on which the Bank of England relies is the difficulty difficul-ty of imitating the paper and the watermark, but that has been overcome, over-come, as we have seen. In these Devenport notes the water mark was very well done. But with a strong light one can easily photograph the water mark, and that done the way Is clear for reproducing it on the paper. The paper is hand-made in the country, and the mark is impressed on the soft pulp by a raised design notes are at once discovered. That is another safeguard, but again it does not come into operation till some one has lost his money. No other bank that I can discover places its trust in plain black print and a watermark. Some-ofthe-Seotchnotes- are made on paper that contains really no secret, and they depend altogether on fine engraving and color printing. So far they have not been forged. One note is adorned with portraits, scenery and complicated lacework engraving, en-graving, both on the face and the back, done with a machine which has secrets of its own, and then it is printed in five colors. On the face are three colors with blue predominating, predomi-nating, and on the back are two, with blue again. Blue baffles the photographer, and is a favorite medium for notes all over the world. "You can hardly conceive of a combination com-bination of talent among forgers sufficient suf-ficient to produce a note like that," said an experienced printer. "You want first of all very fine and costly machinery for engraving, because photography will not do it. Hand work will not do. ' You must have one man to engrave the portraits, another an-other of a different genius who can do the extremely difficult line and lacework, a clever color printer and finely adjusted machinery to place the colors evenly, and also a paper Bank of England. maker who can copy the watermark." The Bank of England stands alone in its reliance on simplicity. Other banks and note-issuing governments depend upon the complexty of design, the difficulty of reproducing the fine engraving, and on the help of color printing. on the wires forming the bottom of the frame. Fine linen rags and threads are the basis of the paper, and there is some secret in the composition, com-position, as there is in many other papers; but that does not pass the skill of the forger, and he can with money, time and a little talent reproduce re-produce the design of the mark. Dev-enport's Dev-enport's paper maker was a little sareless, and made certain rough marks smooth and smooth ones rough. |
