Money laundering sounds like something criminals do, right? Like gangsters and drug dealers hiding their money. But believe it or not, the phrase “money laundering” wasn’t always used for illegal activities!
In 1910, the U.S. Treasury Department had a problem. Lots of paper money was getting dirty and worn out. Instead of throwing it away, a chemist named Burgess Smith invented a special machine. This machine wasn’t for laundering money like criminals do, though! It washed the dirty bills, cleaned them up, and even ironed them flat so they looked like new again. This way, they didn’t have to throw away all that money!
In April 1912, a guy named Lee McClung, who worked at the U.S. Treasury Department, wrote a report to his boss. He said the new money-cleaning machine wasn’t just good for giving people cleaner cash. It would also save the government money on printing new bills! This would be a big help for the entire country’s economy.
The machine was super powerful! It could clean 25,000 dirty bills every single day. That meant they could fix up about 6 out of every 10 bills people brought to the Treasury to get new ones. This saved the government a ton of money – about $250,000 a year back then, which is like having an extra $8 million today! They didn’t have to print as many new bills because they could just clean the old ones.
