In 1910, in the basement of the US Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing, a cacophonous and cumbersome money laundering machine was installed to solve the issue of deteriorating paper money. Instead of sending thousands of soiled dollar bills to the macerator, chemist Burgess Smith invented a contraption that not only washed away the grime, but also sterilised and ironed each note, rendering them pristine and crisp.
In an April 1912 report to Secretary of the Treasury Franklin MacVeagh, Treasurer Lee McClung argued that the machine would not only give people better and cleaner money, but, by reducing the cost of printing new money, it would greatly benefit the US economy.
With the capacity to wash 25,000 notes a day, the apparatus was capable of giving new life to around 60 per cent of bills presented to the Treasury for redemption, saving, it was estimated, roughly $250,000 of annual printing costs (the equivalent of $8,100,000 today).
The demand for clean notes was monumental, or as Treasury officials stated in the Washington Times, banks ‘eat them up’. Mr Smith, on a salary of six dollars per day, was tasked to improve his machine so it could be distributed around the country and, by late 1912, his apparatus was installed in sub-treasuries and financial institutions in most major US cities.
Interest in the device soon grew on the other side of the Atlantic. On 26 September 1912 representatives of the German government visited Washington to witness the machine in action, exploring the possibility of adopting it in their country. The Japanese, French and British governments also expressed an interest in it.
The invention, however, was not immune to criticism. Cynics believed that the clean notes would encourage counterfeiters, but in an article published in the Gettysburg Compiler on 12 March 1913 Joseph E. Ralph of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing denied the possibility: ‘It has been charged in some places that the laundering of money would encourage counterfeiting, but that will not be the case.’ This, he explained, was because forgers tended to artificially soil banknotes, which would be detected during the laundering process.