5 Mil Réis Thesouro Nacional, 1st print

Brazil's National Treasury turned to Perkins, Bacon & Petch in the early 1830s at a moment of acute monetary instability — the young empire was hemorrhaging specie, and paper emissions from multiple competing authorities had badly eroded public confidence. Perkins had by then already established a reputation for security printing through intaglio work that was considered genuinely difficult to counterfeit, which was precisely the selling point for a government trying to reassert credibility in its paper currency.

Jacob Perkins developed the siderographic transfer process that underpins the plate work here — a technique allowing master engravings to be multiplied onto steel without quality loss, first commercialized in bank note production during the 1820s.