Printing the inimitable

In 1818, a public competition was organised to discover a practical way of defeating the forgery of printed money, a major concern in England at that time. Forgeries had been an increasing problem, intensified by the recent Napoleonic Wars up to 1815 and the coming of the Industrial Revolution. In fact, the Bank of England had set up a committee in 1802, to ‘examine plans for the improvement of bank notes’, but found no plan worth recommending. In the meantime, the number of detected forged notes increased from 3,000 in 1803, to 31,000 in 1817.1 

Deterrents were largely ineffective. Both forgery, and the passing of forged notes, were crimes that could bring the death penalty or life deportation, but the forgers themselves were rarely caught and most of the ‘criminals’ executed were simply ‘passers’, often illiterate, and ignorant of their crime. Sympathy, therefore, tended to be with the ‘accused’ in the dock, making juries unwilling to convict and private banks reluctant to prosecute. Public pressure was building and, as a result, between 1817 and 1818, three committees were set up: the Bank of England’s committee; a Royal Commission by the government; and the Society of Arts which held its own inquiry. Sir William Congreve, a governor of the Bank, was one of the seven Royal Commissioners. All three committees were instructed to focus on the problem of large-scale production of identical and inimitable printing and to include consideration for the materials and techniques for the making of paper and ink. 

At this time, the Bank of England’s notes were printed from incised copper plates. Engraved copper could only provide a limited number of prints before the plate became worn and the quality of the printed image deteriorated. This number could range from a few hundred to several thousand copies, depending on the quality of the copper, and the expertise of the printer. Because there was no known method of duplicating engraved plates mechanically this task was undertaken by a team of engravers employed on a full-time basis by the Bank to continually engrave new plates. Not surprisingly, over time, these plates deviated more and more from their prototypes. It was also customary for the Bank’s engravers to renew worn plates by deepening and sharpening lines. This was considered poor practice among engravers generally as prints from these ‘touched up’ plates could never be as fine as the prints from the original plate. 

In such circumstances, it is not surprising that the quality of Bank of England notes was poor, and especially so in the lower-denomination (and most used) notes. It was generally agreed that there was more variety of quality among genuine notes than among the forgeries. Finally, the only people who could discern a genuine note from a forgery were the bank officials who were able to identify the real article by so-called ‘secret’ marks. In fact, these were inimitable but accidental scratches or faults in the engraving. The effect of all this was that the Bank of England notes effectually offered the maximum protection for the forger and minimum protection for the public. 

Bank Commissioner Sir William Congreve submitted three suggestions to the Bank of England Committee. The first was a metal coin, composed of two metals, an inner ‘token’ and outer piece connected together (echoed in today’s £2 coin). The second submission was a ‘triple-paper’: three fused layers of paper, the outer two being plain and the inner one printed in colour and strongly watermarked. The third suggestion involved a method of printing Congreve called ‘compound-plate printing’. All three submissions were thus ‘compound’ in principle. Congreve’s concept was rather similar to another competition entry by J. H. Ibbetson, and as a governor of the Bank of England, Congreve would have had the opportunity of studying all submissions in detail. Ibbetson hinted at this in his pamphlet, A practical view of an invention for better protecting bank-notes against forgery (1819) and it is possible that Congreve’s ‘compound printing’ might have stemmed from Ibbetson’s idea. 

In both Congreve’s and Ibbetson’s process, the printing block was composed of interlocking parts which could be inked separately in different colours before being brought back together for printing at a single impression. Congreve’s patented solution allowed for a more complex treatment and he also devised a machine to facilitate the inking and printing of his plates. Congreve’s plates were made in the following way2: First, a relatively simple design was cut or stamped through a piece of sheet metal so that it appeared rather like a stencil. This stencil plate was then placed on a flat surface and a more fusible metal was melted and poured over it, filling the holes and covering its back, so that the two parts held together but could be easily separated. The face of this compound plate was, therefore, on a single plane although it consisted of two different metals. Next, the face of the plate was engraved with lettering and with mechanically produced linear patterns crossing across and between the different metals. After engraving, the two parts of the plate could be separated, inked in different colours, before being fitted back together and printed in a single pass through the press. 

The mechanically generated patterning mentioned above refers to the use of a rose-engine engraving machine. Ibbetson’s earlier competition entry had made use of an improved rose-engine designed to be used for the engraving of wood blocks. Rose-engine turning had previously been used to apply decorative work onto drinking vessels and pocket watches, and dating back to the early 1600’s. In appearance, the rose-engine resembled a lathe, the crucial difference being that the head-stock, instead of being stationary, is hinged, allowing it to pivot back and forth. By controlling this rocking motion with a rosette – a cam-like disk – it was possible to cut the characteristic ‘wave’ patterns precisely and consistently by moving the plate or the tool either mechanically or by hand. 

The principle of printing from interlocking blocks was not, itself, new. In fact, it had been part of the jobbing printers’ practice since the eighteenth century, enabling a name or address to be changed by cutting through an engraved wood block and fitting the newly engraved block snugly into the space. However, the earliest example of this method being used in colour printing on any scale in Europe is the Psalter by Fust and Schoeffer in Mainz, 1457. The registration of the famous initial letters, printed red and blue with barely a millimeter separating the two, has led many to surmise that some form of ‘pierced’ or interlocking blocks were used. (Multicolour printing simultaneously from a single woodcut block in Oriental printmaking is achieved by using a brush instead of roller to apply ink onto the surface of the block.) 

Due largely to the development of chromolithography, colour in printing was in the ascendancy and problems of accurate registration were a major preoccupation in the printing industry. Fust and Schoeffer’s Psalter became an industrial paradigm, used to represent necessary standards and as a challenge to ingenuity. Significant publications, notably William Savage’s Practical Hints for Decorative Printing, 1823, demonstrated expertise by printing a two-colour reproduction of the initial ‘B’ from the first page of the Psalter. T C Hansard, in his Typographia, 1825 followed suit.

 Sir William Congreve patented ‘compound plate printing’ in 1820, but, by this time, the Bank of England had already adopted a different proposal by the printers Applegath and Cowper. (Congreve’s coin and paper submissions had also been discounted by the Bank.) Nevertheless, Congreve had a compound-plate printing press already established in the government offices at Somerset House, London, and made considerable efforts to gain commissions from private bankers for the use of his process. 

The first major use of compound-plate printing was for the tickets of the coronation of George IV in 1821, carried out by the London printing company Whiting and Branston in co-operation with Charles Dobbs, one of the great nineteenth century masters of embossing. In about 1824, Congreve turned over the patent rights for compound-plate printing to Whiting and Branston, who went on to have considerable success in establishing the process which became associated with security-related items such as tickets, labels, and bank-bills and, occasionally, was also applied to posters and book covers. (Compound-plate printing was, by no means, the only kind of printing undertaken by Whiting and Branston.) Charles Whiting, after Branston’s death in 1827 and Congreve’s in 1828, (Whiting married Congreve’s widow) continued in business, based in the Strand, London, well into the second half of the century. 

Although compound-plate printing was never actually used for the printing of bank notes, it did make a considerable impact in the field of security printing. For example, it was used to print tax stamps used on country banknotes, lottery tickets, paper-duty labels, and medicine-tax labels. Its association with probity and authenticity encouraged its use where manufacturers sought to protect their markets with anti-forgery devices. Pirating of successful products was widespread and a number of companies adopted the compound-plate two-colour interlocked process for their labels as an additional protection. Before long, the familiar Whiting design treatment appeared on a wide range of product labels. 

The distinctive appearance of compound-plate printing, with its panels, lozenges, and arbitrary colour changes, used in combination with the singular decorative rose-engine engraved backgrounds or borders, became firmly established as a graphic design idiom. Ironically, and perhaps inevitably, its visual appearance was imitated by printers using conventional methods, and, long after print technology had solved the problem of accurate registration, the appearance of compound-plate printing survives and is discernible even today in financial graphic communication to establish and convey authenticity. After nearly a century, the presses set up by Congreve in the basement of Somerset House, ceased working when, in 1920, medicine-tax labels were no longer required.