Why Are U.S. Dollars Green?
U.S. currency is strongly associated with the green color that blankets these bills — so much so that “green” is understood to be a synonym for “money.” But while this link is deeply ingrained in the public psyche, that certainly wasn’t the case for anyone around before the U.S. government pushed out the first wave of green notes during the Civil War.
At the time, there was no standard suggesting that money needed to be green, as evidenced by the plethora of colors found on currency around the world. So how exactly did American bills wind up coated in this particular hue?
Early Currency Was Easily Counterfeited
There was paper currency in circulation when the United States took its first baby steps into nationhood, although it wasn’t green. From 1775 to 1779, the Continental Congress issued more than $2 million in paper bills to fund the Revolutionary War. These “Continentals,” which joined the foreign coins and various paper banknotes already in circulation, were tan-colored and made from a distinct cloth mixture that was intended to offset attempts at counterfeiting.
Nevertheless, the British successfully introduced a stream of counterfeit bills into the colonies to devalue the American currency exacerbating the inflation problems caused by overprinting paper money that wasn’t backed by commodities such as gold or silver. By the end of the war, Continentals were all but worthless.
Mindful of the lessons learned from previous efforts to distribute money, Congress passed the Coinage Act in 1792, which established the U.S. Mint and specific denominations of copper, silver, and gold coins — but no paper currency.
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The First Green Ink Designed for Currency
By the 1850s, a variety of bank-issued paper notes were again a prominent part of the American economy. By this period, the U.S. population was larger and more extensive, and the U.S. dollar was established enough for paper notes issued by private banks to gain trust in local communities.
That meant counterfeiting reemerged as a major issue, particularly as developments in photography made it easier to duplicate the images on bills. Even multicolored notes presented little obstacle to the determined counterfeiter, who would scratch off the colored areas, replicate the bills with black-and-white photography, and add in color afterward.
Printers tried creating inks that couldn’t easily be removed by physical or chemical means, which led to the first green ink for paper currency. In 1857, Professor Thomas Sterry Hunt at Laval University in Québec found that by super-heating chromium in a near-oxygen-free environment, the decomposed substance could be mixed with linseed oil to produce a green ink that stubbornly resisted efforts at removal.
Though a patent was filed, additional experiments demonstrated that the green ink could in fact be removed from a note — boiling it in sulphuric acid was one means — so Hunt’s ink was never used on Canadian currency. However, it was deemed sufficient enough by New York printing and engraving executive Tracy R. Edson, who acquired the patent for a firm that became known as the American Bank Note Company.
Civil War-Era Bills Were Known as “Greenbacks”
In 1861, the United States found itself in a similar situation to the one the Continental Congress faced in 1775: War had broken out, and funds were badly needed to pay for troops and supplies.
That summer, the government contracted with the American Bank Note Company to start printing denominations of “Demand Notes,” so-named because they were redeemable “on demand” for gold coins at Treasury facilities. The following year, the government introduced a new series of “United States Notes,” also primarily produced by the American Bank Note Company, which were established as legal currency without the backing of gold.
Both the Demand Notes and the United States Notes featured reverse sides printed in the American Bank Note Company-patented green ink, inspiring the nickname “greenbacks.” Although the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP) today states that “no definite explanation can be made” for why this color was chosen, it’s generally believed that the green ink was considered to be longer-lasting and more effective at preventing counterfeiting than other available inks.
The U.S. Treasury Stuck With Green Ink
Green-tinted money endured as the U.S. banking system was streamlined over the following years, remaining the status quo even as the BEP pushed out private printers to take over the process in 1877, and as the brand-new Federal Reserve System unveiled the first series of Federal Reserve Notes in 1914.
There was an opportunity for a color change in the late 1920s when the Treasury redesigned U.S. currency to shrink bills to save money on production costs. But the government stuck with green ink for the rollout of the now-standard small-size bills in 1929. According to the BEP, the “pigment of that color was readily available in large quantities, the color was relatively high in its resistance to chemical and physical changes, and green was psychologically identified with the strong and stable credit of the government.”
In other words, the green ink retained its original power of thwarting most attempts at counterfeiting (despite what the Canadians felt about it), while having imprinted itself in the psyche of Americans, who began to strongly associate the color with power and comfort.
Today, astute observers will notice that newer series of printed U.S. bills feature subtle additions of color, such as the peach shading on the $20 bill, the purple and gray on the $5 bill, and the orange, yellow, and red on the $10 bill. Yet the predominant green remains an instantly recognizable feature, once part of the effort to deter forgery and now a symbol of the dollar’s lasting success.
