with a reverse impression on the back of each note in 
exact register with the one on the front, and this was 
the plan that was finally chosen by the Bank Com- 
mittee. Printed specimens were sent on to the Royal 
Commission and approved. Applegath and Cowper 
were installed in the Bank where they carried out 
their work in strict secrecy. 
The new bank note was relief printed from stereo- 
‘The method of making the plates was 
involved some 
typed plates. 
a guarded secret. It 
casting system similar to Congreve’s, though the 
apparently 
colors were printed at separate impressions. The 
note was described in the “Bill for protection against 
forgery” of the 10th of July 1820: 
The ground work will be black or coloured, or black or 
coloured line work, and the words, Bank of England, 
will be placed at the top of each bank-note, in white 
letters, upon a black, sable or dark ground, such ground 
containing white lines intersecting each other.’ 
For two years the Bank’s chief engraver, William 
Bawtree, tested the security of the new note by making 
copies, using the ordinary means a forger would have 
at hand. The design of the note was made more and 
more complicated to defeat Bawtree’s efforts, until in 
1821 Bawtree finally succeeded in imitating a five-color 
version. After failing on the basis of Bawtree’s test, 
the Applegath and Cowper note was abandoned by 
the Bank. The old method of copper engraving was 
readopted. 
In 1819 a pamphlet had been issued by another 
competitor, John Holt Ibbetson. This was A prac- 
tical view of an invention for better protecting bank-notes. 
Ibbetson described his own process, ‘‘dissected plate 
printing,” through its stages of evolution and he 
pointed out that it had much in common with 
Congreve’s compound-plate printing. He _ hinted 
that Congreve’s process might be derived from his, 
for Congreve, as commissioner, had “‘had the op- 
portunity of perusing the various plans which were 
submitted to his board.” * Ibbetson’s submissions 
had been made between November 1818 and January 
1819, ten months before Congreve’s first patent was 
taken out. His ideas, as they were described in the 
Practical view, were broad and vague. Originally 
Ibbetson simply took relief prints from wood blocks 
engraved by his improved model of the rose-engine 
engraving machine. Later he thought of cutting up 
8 Quoted in J. H. Ispetson’s A practical view of an invention for 
better protecting bank-notes (London, 1820), p. 67. 
9 Ibid., p. 62. 
the engraved blocks and separating the parts with 
type. Finally he inked the several parts in different 
colors, clamped them together and printed them as 
one block. Specimens of the process in this final 
form were shown to the Bank Commission in January 
1819. 
were the basis of Congreve’s compound process. 
Some illustrations in the Practical view demonstrated 
Ibbetson’s two-color printing (figures 5 and 6). The 
designs were bold and attractive, with the blocks 
divided into relatively simple geometrical shapes 
for the two colors. But this very simplicity worked 
against the process as an acceptable means of pre- 
Ibbetson’s method of cutting the 
blocks, which he kept secret, was evidently not 
capable of producing the complicated filigree of 
Congreve’s plates. 
Congreve was probably referring to Ibbetson’s 
prints in a note in his next pamphlet, Analysis of the 
true principles of security against forgery published in 
1820: 
We have seen such printing [as the compound prints] 
produced from blocks; but the form in which the colour 
was introduced was extremely simple, not at all like the 
work here described.'° 
It was these specimens that Ibbetson suggested 
venting forgery. 
But Congreve made no public reply to Ibbetson’s 
pamphlet. The Bank competition had led to a 
number of similar charges, chiefly suggesting that the 
Commission had shown unfair favor to Applegath 
and Cowper, whose method was said to be the same as 
other suggestions made and rejected over the previous 
fifteen years. 
While Ibbetson was making his barely concealed 
accusations, Congreve himself was involved in a 
quarrel with the American contestant, Jacob Perkins. 
Perkins had been as persistent as Congreve in sub- 
mitting his “‘siderographic’’ notes to the Bank 
(figure 17). Siderography was a mechanical method 
of making faithful copies of engraved steel plates 
in almost unlimited numbers. <A single steel en- 
graving could provide as many duplicate plates as 
were needed. The plates were printed by the intaglio 
rather than the relief process, that is, the ink-holding 
lines were grooves sunk below the surface of the steel. 
The original engraving, usually measuring only one 
or two inches square, was made on a plate of mild 
steel, and the surface of the steel was then hardened 
10 SiR W. ConGRevE, Analysis of the true principles of security 
against forgery (London, 1820), p. 10. 
76 BULLETIN 252: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 
