A US$110 Billion Screw. | The Gadget Grill

Screw up, that is.

Earlier this year in the US, they announced a revised $100 note, featuring new security features, with a release date scheduled for early-ish in 2011.

Unfortunately, these notes have struck a minor snag in printing, and production of these notes has had to be stopped while the problems are sorted and rectified.

What’s been happening is that during printing, the paper gets creased, and that leaves a blank area on the notes. That is clearly not satisfactory, and so production has been stopped, but only after in excess of one billion of the notes have been produced.

New US 100 Dollar Note

The fun part begins when you understand that at a casual glance, the notes look fine, but you pull at the sides of the faulty notes, the crease undoes itself, revealing the blank area.

It’s estimated that about 30% of the notes are faulty, and to find the faulty notes by checking them by hand would take maybe 20 or 30 years to complete. For obvious reasons, they’re trying to find a way to automate the process of finding the faulty notes, but that too is not an easy task.

CNBC has more on the story here.