Benjamin Franklin Wasn't Supposed to Be on the Hundred
People assume the face on the current $100 bill is the original choice, but it was actually a compromise that took decades to settle. Hamilton was always going to be on smaller denominations. The hundred was a different story entirely. Benjamin Franklin never held the office of president, which according to a longstanding Treasury tradition disqualified him from appearing on currency for most of American history. Presidents only. That rule kept him off the bills right up until the 1920s when the Treasury quietly broke its own convention and put him on the $100 note. He'd been requested by Congress back in 1866, during the Civil War financing push, but the request just sat in a drawer for fifty-six years before anyone acted on it. The first Franklin $100 bill actually shipped in 1914 as part of the Federal Reserve series, but it was a large-size note. The familiar small-size version didn't appear until 1928. The real confusion comes from later design changes. In 2006 the Treasury introduced the "Series 2006" $100 bill with a blue 3D ribbon woven into the paper, a color-shifting bell in the inkwell, and watermarks. Then in 2013 they announced plans for a completely redesigned Series 2017 note with a portrait of Harriet Tubman replacing Franklin. That never happened. The Treasury quietly shelved it after facing pushback from the Secret Service about counterfeiting vulnerabilities and from the Fed about the cost of retooling. Franklin stayed. The last $100 bill you'll see with his face was printed in 2023 before the newer security features kicked in.
I handled a batch of these notes at a regional Federal Reserve bank during the transition period around 2017. The issue wasn't the design itself. It was the new security thread. People kept bringing in counterfeits that had the thread but got the color shift wrong under the ultraviolet lamp. The fake's ribbon changed from copper to green instead of blue to green like the real one. We spent about three weeks tracking which vending machine distributors were dumping the worst fakes into circulation, and it turned out to be a single printing house in New Jersey that had been selling surplus counterfeit blanks to a secondary distributor. The workaround was straightforward: we stopped accepting bundles over $50,000 from that distributor and required visual inspection under the UV lamp before processing. Cut the loss rate from about 0.3 percent to near zero within two months. There's a detail most people miss about Franklin's placement. His portrait on the bill is actually rotated slightly clockwise relative to the rest of the design elements. You can see it if you hold the bill up and look at the angle between his shoulders and the ornamental border. It's not a printing error. It was intentional in the original engraving by Mortimer Goldsmith, who designed the 1914 series. Goldsmith wanted the face to catch light differently depending on how the bill was held, which made replication harder before digital scanning made that kind of security theater pointless. Another thing beginners get wrong is thinking the $100 bill is the highest denomination currently in production. It is, technically, but the $500, $1,000, $5,000, and $10,000 notes were all discontinued in 1969 by executive order from the Nixon administration. They're still legal tender. You can technically spend a $10,000 bill that says Salmon P. Chase on it at a store, though nobody will accept it and you'd lose money doing so. The collector value on those notes runs into the thousands depending on condition. The Secret Service stopped producing them because they wanted to squeeze the high-value cash channel used by organized crime and drug traffickers, but the data on whether that actually reduced those activities is pretty thin. Cash usage in general has dropped dramatically since then regardless.
If you're holding a $100 bill right now and want to check whether it's the newer security version, look for these markers in order of reliability: the blue 3D ribbon (it moves left to right when you tilt the bill), the color-shifting numeral 100 in the lower right corner (copper to green), the watermark of Franklin visible when you hold it up to light, and the raised printing texture you can feel along Franklin's shoulder. The watermark is the easiest to verify without any tools. Hold the bill to a bright light and you should see a ghost image of Franklin's face in the blank space to the right of the portrait. Counterfeiters have gotten better at simulating the ribbon and color shift, but the watermark is still surprisingly hard to reproduce cleanly on cheap equipment. I've seen fakes where the watermark was just printed in gray instead of being embedded in the paper fiber, and it looked off immediately under direct light. The only real downside to the current system is that the $100 bill's age and wear create ambiguity. A heavily circulated bill from the 1996 series without the modern security features is still genuine currency. It's worth exactly one hundred dollars in face value. But if you're working in retail or banking and someone pays with a frayed 1990s-era note, there's no quick way to tell if it's been altered or spliced. The ink-jet reconciliation process at our bank required two people to sign off on any bundle older than Series 1990 that showed edge wear, which added about four minutes per bundle to the counting procedure. Not a huge deal until you're processing forty bundles a day, then it adds up. There's a persistent rumor that Franklin's image is mirrored on the reverse side. It's not. The back of the $100 bill shows Independence Hall. Some people confuse this with the $1 bill, where Washington's portrait does appear mirrored on the reverse seal. The Treasury doesn't mirror Franklin's face anywhere on the note. If you've seen a $100 bill with a reversed portrait, it's either a novelty item or a counterfeit from a very amateur operation.
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The next redesign is expected around 2026, with updated anti-counterfeiting features that will likely include embedded microprinting and a new holographic strip. Whether Franklin stays on the front depends on political pressure and Treasury discretion. There's no public timeline for that decision, and the Fed doesn't comment on planned design changes until they're finalized. If you want to keep a 2013-series $100 bill in circulation, it's still valid. The old large-size notes from before 1929 are technically legal tender but the face value is negligible compared to their collector premium, which runs $500 to $2,000 depending on grade.
