Ohio native is perfecting his 'fine, exquisite craft'

The currency engraver has been told he is a dying breed.
DAYTON (AP) -- When Christopher D. Madden sits down to engrave the images emblazoned on the nation's cash, he sits between centuries of tradition and the promise of technology.
On one side of him are steel-edged tools, steel plates, aged magnifying glasses and antiquated equipment that Madden uses to painstakingly engrave pictures of presidents and luminaries, federal buildings and their environs.
On the other side are two computers, set side-by-side. With those, he uses a proprietary program to add dashes and lines to a currency design to make that currency harder to counterfeit and easier to print.
Madden is one of three bank note engravers who produce images at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing; three others do lettering.
For years, Madden was told he was part of a dying breed -- the master craftsmen who spend 10 years in apprenticeship, learning the fine, detailed art of faithfully etching images into steel.
Now, the bureau has plans to hire two new apprentices in the coming months.
The addition of a computer component to the time-honored art has caused some skepticism, but also brought new possibilities in protecting currency from counterfeiters.
To further thwart counterfeiting, the bureau will redesign its currency at least every seven to 10 years, giving Madden renewed faith that his profession will continue long after he becomes part of bureau history.
Madden's father, Odean, a General Motors Corp. employee in Dayton, encouraged his son's artistic talents, but was a little skeptical of art as a career.
"He used to tell me, 'Art's a fine hobby, son, but what are you going to do to make a living?'" Madden said.
After graduating from Arcanum High School in 1981, Madden joined the Army, then went to Ohio State University and the Columbus College of Art and Design.
As graduation approached, he wasn't sure what he'd do, then saw an ad posted at his school: It was for a bank note engraver.
The recruiter asked Madden if he had any experience engraving, and Madden answered frankly that he did not.
All the better, the recruiter said. They preferred candidates with no preconceived notions of what the job should be. They wanted candidates willing to do a 10-year apprenticeship and learn the trade from scratch.
Madden took the job in 1988 and has been there ever since.
It would prove to be an answer to his father's challenge, he said. He could make art and produce useful things, as his father and grandfather, a coal miner, had done before him.
Difficult job
It is a job that takes diligence, patience and skill, making faithful reproductions of an image, using a combination of lines, dashes and dots. A dash too deep could appear to give a president an unseemly scar.
An added challenge is portraying tones and shades through the depth of the lines. On many works, the dashes have to be as identical as possible to accurately replicate the original image.
But because they are done by hand, the images are like fingerprints impossible to duplicate exactly. "This is the most difficult graphic art to perform," he said.
Reminders of the past shape Madden's work.
He keeps on his desk an album of some of the great engravings done at the office -- detailed, elegant work by artists history has forgotten. Madden often flips through the book to study how others handled particular challenges.
Legacy
Next to that book, Madden keeps a photo album of the artists -- sometimes imperious-looking men in black-and-white photos who toiled to create the art people handle casually each day.
In a way, he's carrying out his father's legacy: He is making something everyone needs.
Reminders of his grandfather's coal mining trade linger, as well.
For many years, others in the engraving bureau used cyanide to help make the plates for the currency. And just like workers in coal mines, they used live canaries to determine the safety of their work environment.
Now, safer methods are used, and the office canaries are simply workplace pets.
The computers are another sign of change. Madden is one of the first to use the new program to tweak lines and add depth. So far, he has not used it to design new currency.
Instead, he uses it to further foil counterfeiters by making the fingerprint in existing currency even more distinctive. The technology also makes the currency print more crisply and attractively.
But Madden has no fear that the "fine, exquisite craft" it took him 10 years to learn is headed toward extinction.
Engraving still is a defense against counterfeiters, and even those who will rely more heavily on technology will have to know the engraving craft to successfully do their work.
He was the bureau's last apprentice until this newest crop.