Thomas Hipschen: the hand behind the faces on your money

At seventeen, Thomas Hipschen took a 25-hour bus ride out of Bellevue, Iowa, to Washington, D.C. A cousin had told him the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing was taking on apprentices. He stayed for the rest of his career.

In 1968 he began a ten-year formal apprenticeship — that is not a typo. Banknote engraving is one of the slowest crafts to learn on earth. The engraver cuts a portrait in reverse, by hand, into a steel plate, building a face out of thousands of tiny lines and dots that no forger can casually copy. Mistakes don't erase. Hipschen trained at George Washington University, American University, and the Corcoran School of Art alongside the years at the bench.

He spent close to four decades at the Bureau. And the work ended up in nearly every wallet in America.

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

Currency was only half of it. As a picture engraver he produced more than 130 U.S. postage and revenue stamps — a body of small, exacting work that ran for decades. When new high-security notes were designed in the 1990s and 2000s, Hipschen was one of the hands that redrew the nation's money.

Before he retired from federal service in 2006, he did one more lasting thing: he trained the next generation of apprentices, passing on a security-engraving tradition that very few people alive still practice. Today he teaches at the Intaglio Engravers Academy in Urbino, Italy, keeping the craft itself from dying out.

A banknote man left one mark on a coin. Through the U.S. Mint's Artistic Infusion Program — which brings outside artists into the Mint's design process — Hipschen designed the reverse (the tails side) of the 2016 National Park Service Centennial half dollar. The design is the National Park Service's arrowhead emblem, paired with the words STEWARDSHIP and RECREATION — the agency's mission in two words.

The coin honored the NPS's 100th birthday. Following Mint practice, an outside designer's drawing is translated into the finished coin by a staff sculptor-engraver; here that was Charles L. Vickers, who sculpted Hipschen's reverse for striking.