A postage stamp is a small piece of paper issued by a submit office, postal administration, or other legal carriers to customers who pay postage (the fee concerned in shifting, insuring, or registering mail), who then affix the stamp to the face or cope with-facet of any object of mail—an envelope or different postal cover (e.g., packet, container, mailing cylinder)—that they want to send. The object is then processed through the postal system, in which a postmark or cancellation mark—in current utilization indicating date and point of beginning of mailing—is applied to the stamp and its left and proper facets to save you its reuse. The object is then delivered to its addressee.
Always presenting the call of the issuing state (except the United Kingdom), a denomination of its value, and often an instance of men and women, events, establishments, or natural realities that characterize the nation’s traditions and values, each stamp is printed on a piece of generally square, however sometimes triangular or in any other case formed unique custom-made paper whose again is both glazed with an adhesive gum or self-adhesive.
Because governments trouble stamps of various denominations in unequal numbers and robotically stop a few strains and introduce others, and due to their illustrations and association with the social and political realities of the time of their trouble, they’re frequently prized for their beauty and historical importance by means of stamp creditors whose observe in their history and of mailing structures is referred to as philately. Because creditors regularly buy stamps from an issuing agency without a intention to use them for postage, the sales from such purchases and payments of postage can make them a source of internet profit to that enterprise. On 1 May 1840, the Penny Black, the primary adhesive postage stamp, changed into issued in the United Kingdom. Within three years postage stamps had been added in Switzerland and Brazil, a little later inside the United States, and by way of 1860, they had been in ninety international locations around the world.[1] The first postage stamps did no longer want to reveal the issuing country, so no u . s . a . name became covered on them. Thus the UK remains the only us of a in the international to pass over its call on postage stamps; the monarch’s image indicates the UK as the us of a of foundation.[2]Invention[edit]
Throughout current records, severa techniques have been used to suggest that postage were paid on a mailed item, so several distinct men have acquired credit score for inventing the postage stamp.William Dockwra[edit]
In 1680, William Dockwra, an English merchant in London, and his associate Robert Murray mounted the London Penny Post, a mail machine that delivered letters and small parcels within the metropolis of London for the sum of one penny. Confirmation of paid postage become indicated through using a hand stamp to frank the mailed item. Though this “stamp” was applied to the letter or parcel itself, in preference to to a separate piece of paper, it’s far taken into consideration by using many historians to be the world’s first postage stamp.[three]Lovrenc Košir[edit]
In 1835, the civil servant Lovrenc Košir from Ljubljana in Austria-Hungary (now Slovenia), suggested the usage of “artificially affixed postal tax stamps”[four] the use of “gepresste Papieroblate” (“pressed paper wafers”), but despite the fact that civil bureaucrats taken into consideration the concept in detail, it turned into not followed.[five][6] The ‘Papieroblate’ had been to supply stamps as paper decals so thin as to prevent their reuse.[7]Rowland Hill[edit]
In 1836, Robert Wallace, a Member of (British) Parliament, gave Sir Rowland Hill numerous books and files about the postal service, which Hill defined as a “1/2 hundred weight of fabric”.[8][9] After an in depth have a look at, on four January 1837 Hill submitted a pamphlet entitled Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability, marked “personal and personal”, and not released to the general public, to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Thomas Spring Rice.[10] The Chancellor summoned Hill to a meeting at which he recommended enhancements and modifications to be supplied in a complement, which Hill duly produced and submitted on 28 January 1837.[11]
Summoned to offer proof earlier than the Commission for Post Office Enquiry on 13 February 1837, Hill examine from the letter he wrote to the Chancellor that included a announcement saying that the notation of paid postage will be created… with the aid of using a piece of paper just big enough to bear the stamp, and blanketed on the again with a glutinous wash…”[12][thirteen] This could in the end come to be the first unambiguous description of a contemporary adhesive postage stamp (even though the time period “postage stamp” originated at later date). Shortly afterward, Hill’s revision of the e-book, dated 22 February 1837, containing some 28,000 words, incorporating the complement given to the Chancellor and statements he made to the fee, become published and made available to the overall public. Hansard records that on 15 December 1837, Benjamin Hawes requested the Chancellor of the Exchequer “whether or not it became the goal of the Government to offer impact to the advice of the Commissioners of the Post-office, contained in their ninth report relating to the reduction of the rates of postage, and the issuing of penny stamps?”[14]
Hill’s ideas for postage stamps and charging paid-postage based on weight quickly took preserve, and were adopted in many nations at some stage in the arena.[1] With the new policy of charging by means of weight, the use of envelopes for mailing documents have become the norm. Hill’s brother Edwin invented a prototype envelope-making device that folded paper into envelopes fast sufficient to fit the tempo of the growing demand for postage stamps.[15]
Rowland Hill and the reforms he added to the United Kingdom postal gadget seem on several of its commemorative stamps.[15]James Chalmers[edit]
In the 1881 book The Penny Postage Scheme of 1837, Scotsman Patrick Chalmers claimed that his father, James Chalmers, posted an essay in August 1834 describing and advocating a postage stamp, but submitted no evidence of the essay’s existence. Nevertheless, till he died in 1891, Patrick Chalmers campaigned to have his father diagnosed as the inventor of the postage stamp.[sixteen]
The first independent evidence for Chalmers’ claim is an essay, dated eight February 1838 and received by means of the Post Office on 17 February 1838, wherein he proposed adhesive postage stamps to the General Post Office.[17] In this about 800-phrase file concerning strategies of indicating that postage had been paid on mail he states:”Therefore, of Mr Hill’s plan of a uniform charge of postage… I conceive that the maximum easy and reasonably-priced mode… could be via Slips… within the hope that Mr Hill’s plan can also soon be carried into operation I might endorse that sheets of Stamped Slips have to be organized… then be rubbed over on the returned with a robust solution of gum…”.
Chalmers’ original document is now within the United Kingdom’s National Postal Museum.
Since Chalmers used the same postage denominations that Hill had proposed in February 1837, it’s far clear that he become privy to Hill’s proposals, however whether he received a copy of Hill’s guide or virtually examine approximately it in a single or each of the two particular money owed boeliem (25 March 1837[18] and 20 December 1837[19]) published in The Times is unknown. Neither article stated “a chunk of paper simply large sufficient to undergo the stamp”, so Chalmers couldn’t have acknowledged that Hill had made such an offer. This suggests that either Chalmers had formerly study Hill’s publication and turned into simply elaborating Hill’s concept, or he had independently evolved the concept of the modern postage stamp.
James Chalmers prepared petitions “for an extremely low and uniform charge of postage”. The first such petition was provided in the House of Commons on four December 1837 (from Montrose).[20] Further petitions organised through him had been provided on 1 May 1838 (from Dunbar and Cupar), 14 May 1838 (from the county of Forfar), and 12 June 1839. At this same time, different agencies organised petitions and supplied them to Parliament. All petitions for purchaser-orientated, low-cost, volume-based totally postal costs accompanied publication of Hill’s proposals.Other claimants[edit]
Other claimants include or have blanketed[21]Dr John Gray of the British MuseumSamuel Forrester, a Scottish tax authenticCharles Whiting, a London stationerSamuel Roberts of Llanbrynmair, WalesFrancis Worrell Stevens, schoolmaster at LoughtonFerdinand Egarter of Spittal, AustriaCurry Gabriel Treffenberg from SwedenHistory[edit]The 19th century[edit]