40 Dollars 'Continental Currency' - United States

Continental Currency was printed under Congressional authorization and backed by nothing more concrete than a promise of future tax redemption by the individual states — a mechanism that failed almost immediately. By 1778, the year of this issue, massive over-emission had already begun eroding public confidence, and the phrase "not worth a Continental" was entering common use. The forty-dollar denomination was one of the higher face values in circulation, which made it both a target for the British counterfeiting campaign and a denomination ordinary colonists rarely handled at face value.

Hall and Sellers, the Philadelphia printing firm of Benjamin Franklin's old Pennsylvania Gazette, used nature-printed leaf impressions as the primary anti-counterfeiting device — a technique Franklin himself had championed decades earlier. The British, flooding the colonies with forged notes to destabilize the war economy, found the botanical prints genuinely difficult to replicate convincingly.