The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-07-22
FORGED BANKNOTEs.
Amount in England Increasing, as De
 sign is Easily Reproduced.

AHOuuL III EnSland increasing. as De'
 sign is Easily Reproduced.
 Is the English banknote safe? The number of forgeries which have taken place in recent years suggest that 1t is not nearly so safe from the tricks of the forger as it was once thought to be, pnd we have the statement of the coun- sel for the Bank of England to confirm the complaint of those who demand that it should be changed.
 Mr.. Mathews said, a feW weeks ago, at the Old Bailey, that the circulation of spurious notes on the continent has become so extensive in some districts that now even genuine notes of five pounds and ten pounds are most diffl- cult to negotiate. Time was when a Bank of England note would carry one most where's and saw one through most things; but in some places that is no longer possible.
 Forgers are, of course, becoming more expert every year. They are better ed- ucated., They have scientific knowledge and the aid of photography and the instruments of the criminal enterprise are comparatively cheap The Bank of England note is the most easily forged of all. for it is the sifplest, consisting as it does of black printing on a white paper. The great safeguard lies in the quality of the paper and the quality of the printing, and, the watermark on the paper.
 To make the actual paper is beyond the skill of the cleverest forger. It Is made at "a small town near London; but so we'll has the secret been guarded that the most skilful note printers in tine trade do not understand that, though they know most of the other secrets.
 Note printing is one of the highly skilled trades which still is a virtual monopoly of the city of London. It has always been so, and the great banks of the world come to the engravers and printers of London to have their notes or their plates made. They turn out the most beautiful printing in Europe. Some of 1t is of the fost complicated description, and in this fact lies its great safety.
 The steel plate is the work of many hands and many brains. When the main design has been decided upon, the parts of the picture have to be given over to several engravers, each of whom is skilled in one branch of his art, and could not exchange his part with any of the others. One is an architectural engraver, and, with a fine needle, he labors for weeks in the effort to convey to the metal a perfect pic- ture of building. Another, with skill of quite different sort, fakes portraits, a. third draws scenery, while a fourth fashions the letters. Still others con trive corner pieces; and then there is the machine engraver, which is more wonderful still, for the machine does work so fine that no human eye, can im- itate it.
 The complicated work of tracery which you see on the back and front of. Scotch and foreign notes is so minute that the camera cannot effectively copy it. To reproduce with photo- graphy on zinc it is necessary to en- ploy acid, and the acid would eat away these fine lines. The work is done by machine which Is made on the principle of the pantograph. It seems to consist of multitude of wheels and eccen- tries, and apparatus for guiding and checking the needle, and sending it in new directions at all sorts of unexpec- ted angles and curves.
 After the design has been worked out Tho mo nh41a sy, A1,e secret code which is kept by the pro- prietor locked in the safe, the machine does the work itself, if the operator will go on turning the driving crank slowly and steadily. The plan is taken out. with numbers, which represent the wheels and the code of figures, showing the work which is to he done by each wheel and how 1t comes into play. But the operator cannot know that secret. The machine simply goes on in its own way, and the least slackening of any of the parts will put it all out. A work man cannot repair the error, for he does not know the code, and the whole work will be spoiled until the master comes along and resets the wheels and other parts in their proper order.
 Only small part of the design is worked out by this delicate machine just enough to give a complete repre- sentation of the pattern. Then that portion is stamped on soft steel, which is hardened by another secret process and made into a sort of die, which is used to impress other plates of steel, till the full border is thus completed, or a band made to go across the whole face or back of the note
 In the best of the colored notes three or four tints are used, and generally you find that one of them is blue. It defies the camera. The different colors are put on with different plates, and each means a separate printing. The result is that if you hold one of the notes up to the light you will find that the lines of the different ooIors run into