While the US press and politicians squawk about the redesign of the twenty-dollar bill, the Bank of England has released a preliminary design for a new polymer £50 note scheduled for release in late 2021. It honors Alan Turing, Britain’s most famous WWII codebreaker.
The latest of Britain’s polymer banknotes—a £5 note was issued in 2016 and a £10 in 2017—the 50 will follow the 20-pounder slated for a 2020 debut.
Righting Old Wrongs
Alan Turing was a British mathematician and inventor credited with designing and building the early computers used by England’s intelligence services to crack the infamous Enigma codes of the Nazis in World War II. His story was told (and heavily fictionalized) in the 2014 hit movie “The Imitation Game.”
Victimized by England’s Victorian era laws criminalizing homosexuality—the same laws under which Oscar Wilde was tried—Turing was subjected to chemical castration and later committed suicide in 1954. Sex between men over the age of 21 was decriminalized in England and Wales in 1967, but it wasn’t until 1980 and 1982 that Scotland and Northern Ireland followed suit.
Turing received a posthumous royal pardon in 2013, and in 2017 the so-called Turing Law granting pardons to those convicted under the previous laws received royal assent, making it the law of the land.
The Plasticization of Money
As soon as the first money was issued, the counterfeiting business followed closely behind. Now with the advent of sophisticated fakers able to churn out large numbers of bogus bills, governments keep seeking ways to put them out of operation. The latest step is using plastic such as biaxially-oriented polypropylene (BOPP) to replace the cotton-fiber papers in use for several centuries.
First perfected by the Royal Bank of Australia in the late 1980s after several others failed, polymer banknotes incorporate security features unachievable with paper notes Besides intricate intaglio images, color-shifting inks, holograms and embedded strips, polymer bills can incorporate machine-readable features to verify their authenticity.
A Proliferation of Plastic
Today Canada, New Zealand, Vietnam and several other countries have converted entirely to polymer notes and others like the UK, Chile, Mexico, and Russia are phasing them in.
As of this writing, the US doesn’t plan on switching to polymer notes any time soon. At a 2017 meeting in Europe, Fed associate director Michael Lambert said decisions should be made based on each country’s own security assessments. And for the US at least, those are a secret.
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