Thomas Hipschen: the hand behind the $100 bill

In 1968 a seventeen-year-old from Bellevue, Iowa boarded a bus to Washington, D.C. with a ticket his grandfather had bought him. His father managed a drugstore. He was the second-oldest of ten children. A cousin who designed postage stamps at the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing — the federal shop that prints American money — told him to come compete for an apprenticeship.

He won it, beating out dozens of older artists. Then the real test began: a ten-year formal apprenticeship. That is not a misprint. Banknote engraving is one of the slowest crafts on earth to learn. The engraver cuts a picture in reverse, by hand, into a steel plate — building a face out of thousands of tiny lines and dots with a pointed steel chisel called a burin. The density and precision of those marks are exactly what a forger can't casually copy; that is the whole point of the craft. Nothing erases. One wrong cut can wreck weeks of work.

Hipschen's first job was a seven-cent Benjamin Franklin postage stamp. He had no idea that the same face, decades later, would become the work he is remembered for. He studied at George Washington University, American University, and the Corcoran School of Art while he learned the bench. He stayed at the Bureau for roughly 37 years.

Hipschen was a portrait engraver — the rarest and most demanding specialty in the trade, the artist who cuts the human face that anchors a banknote. The portraits he engraved sit on the U.S. bills Americans handle every day: Benjamin Franklin on the $100, Ulysses S. Grant on the $50, Andrew Jackson on the $20, and Abraham Lincoln on the $5. He cut the back vignettes for those notes too.

The Franklin on the modern $100 was a labor of obsession. Hipschen read four biographies of Franklin and spent about 500 hours on the single portrait. He once described the work plainly: "There are a million little decisions because there are a million little dots. It's a very tiny canvas, so all the space has to be put to good use." Currency was only part of it — across his career he engraved more than 130 U.S. postage and revenue stamps.

The craft was changing under him. In 2000 the Bureau sent him to Lausanne, Switzerland to learn digital engraving — building portraits on a computer instead of cutting steel by hand. He didn't love it. He said the screen work gave him carpal tunnel and left him feeling "worthless," because he wasn't making "anything original" — he was copying. He retired from federal service around 2006. Before he left, he trained the next generation of apprentices, handing down a security-engraving tradition almost no one alive still practices. Today he teaches the craft at the Intaglio Engravers Academy in Urbino, Italy.

When the banknote man made coins <!-- kind: prose; anchor: the-coins -->

A man who spent his life on paper money left his mark on coins exactly once — in a single year. Through the U.S. Mint's Artistic Infusion Program, which invites outside artists to submit coin and medal designs, Hipschen designed the reverses (the tails sides) of two 2016 coins.

The one collectors know him for is the National Park Service Centennial half dollar. Hipschen designed its reverse around the National Park Service's arrowhead emblem — the little brown badge on every ranger's shoulder and park sign. Read it closely and the whole agency is packed into one shape: a giant sequoia for the forests, an American bison for the wildlife, mountains and a lake for the land the Park Service protects. He flanked the denomination with two words that sum up the agency's mission — STEWARDSHIP and RECREATION. The Mint's sculptor-engraver Charles L. Vickers translated the drawing into the finished coin.

That same year, Hipschen also designed the reverse of the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park quarter in the America the Beautiful series. It shows John Brown's Fort — the engine house where the abolitionist made his last stand during the 1859 raid on the federal armory. Mint sculptor-engraver Phebe Hemphill sculpted it. Under Mint practice, an outside artist supplies the design and a staff sculptor-engraver does the modeling for striking — which is why both coins carry two names.