But recently, Americans decided they liked jeans that stretched, so jeans companies began adding spandex to their fabric. Paper money wore soft, like a pair of blue jeans, because it was made from blue jeans. American currency is still made with rags - until the last decade or so, mostly from the trims and off-cuts of denim manufacturers, including Levi's. made paper from discarded rags collected by stooped men pushing carts. Crane paper has been the money in American pockets since. Bureau of Engraving and Printing with paper in 1879, when the mill was only sixteen years old. (The Crane ledgers, which begin with Colonel Thomas Crane in 1770, include the sale of "13 reams of money paper" to a Boston silversmith named Paul Revere.) Winthrop Crane, Doug's great-great-grandfather, won the first contract to supply the U.S. Today the company is under the stewardship of fifty-three-year-old Doug Crane, the seventh generation of his family to manage the business. The mill is named for a local hero, Captain Byron Weston, but is owned and operated by Crane & Co., makers of fine paper. The boiler is housed in an ancient redbrick mill, built in 1863, tumbling toward the shore of the Housatonic River in tiny Dalton, Massachusetts. There it is, the earliest, no-bullshit incarnation of cash: piles of raw cellulose cooked to its fibrous essence, as brown as it is white, and scalding. The boiler feels almost monstrous, a relic of a spitting industrial age, corrosive and mean, and it feels that way especially when it finally stops spinning and its oval maw clangs open, vomiting tons of boiling cotton that hits the floor with a heavy slap. It is hot in its shadow, the steam coming off it like breath, and every surface within twenty yards is either dripping or damp.
![testing 20 dollar bill serial number lookup testing 20 dollar bill serial number lookup](https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/254453583844_/20-Dollar-1-Dollar-Bill-Fancy-Serial-Number.jpg)
The towers and the gears allow the boiler to spin like a planet, like Saturn, rust-colored with wide rings of black grease. A network of gears, each tooth the size of a fist, churns away in the darkness behind it. Most people swear out loud when they see it for the first time. It's a perfect sphere, an angry kettle fifteen feet across, spinning high off the ground between two stained concrete towers. Our new hundred-dollar bill, like every other single piece of American folding money, is born in this rotary boiler.