When did people start sending postcards? The first postcard that we would recognize today as a postcard was sent in 1861, and by the end of the 1860s, they were being commercially made and posted.
We have probably all sent and received a postcard in our lifetime. You go to a nice destination, you buy a selection of postcards with scenes of where you are on them, you sit in a café and spend about an hour writing the same thing on each of them, addressing them, and then you make your way to the post office to send them. It is tradition. Or, at least, it was tradition. The number of postcards sent a year has peaked and has been declining. It is impossible to know the exact number of postcards that are sent a year, but reports by the post offices in different countries say that the number is on the decline. The main reason for this would be the rise of digital communication. If you have WhatsApp, Instagram, or LINE, you can send a photo of where you are and a message to someone in another country in seconds. There is no reason to go to the extent of sending a postcard. In fact, some young people might not even know what a postcard is.
Several things with the postal service and society had to change before postcards could become a practical idea. Paper decorated with illustrations had existed in France since the 1770s, but these were not postcards because they did not have prepaid postage. In fact, there was no such thing as prepaid postage. They were also not popular because the people who could afford to buy them did not want their servants to read what they were writing. And this is one of the first things that had to change before postcards became practical. Before the middle of the 19th century, the majority of people had neither the time nor the money to be able to travel anywhere, negating the need for postcards. All this changed with the introduction of the railway. Towns were connected, and it became possible for people to travel to other places. The middle class was beginning to grow, workplaces were being reformed, and the idea of modern tourism began. These were the people who could afford to send postcards.
The second change that was needed was within the post office. Up to the middle of the 19th century, postage was typically paid for by the person that received it. This led to a whole host of problems, primarily that people didn’t always want to pay. The British post office was reformed in 1837 by Rowland Hill, and the postage stamp was invented shortly after. The idea of prepaying to send a letter was new, but it was easy, and it caught on fast. The US made similar reforms in the late 1850s and introduced its own postage stamps. This change meant that postcards were now possible.
In the early days, there were several picture cards sent through the mail, but they were more like experiments than postcards. People were trying to work out what they could do with the new postal system. In 1861, in Philadelphia, John Carlton patented postal cards. They had a decorated border on one side and space to write on. He sold the patent, but the cards never caught on. The first real postcards were created by Dr. Emanuel Herrmann in Austria. He proposed it to the postal service and, after some hesitation, they went ahead with the idea. These cards were prepaid, but they didn’t have images on them. The post office printed 3 million, and the government gave them to soldiers during the Franco-Prussian War. Other countries took note and copied the idea.
The first picture postcard was invented in Camp Conlie in France but Leon Besnardeau. Again, they were mostly used by soldiers, but they were posted in envelopes. The first picture postcards that were sent as postcards were invented by a German bookdealer called August Schwartz in 1870. Then, in 1871, the first souvenir picture postcard was invented in Vienna. Postcards were popular, but they only really took off with the invention of photography, and especially color photography. As it became cheaper and cheaper to print a photo on a postcard, they took off. And we never looked back. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://www.pixartprinting.ie/blog/history-of-postcards
https://library.ualberta.ca/peel/postcards/the-postcard-a-brief-history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcard
https://worldpostcardday.com/history
https://culturetourist.com/cultural-tourism/history-of-travelling-how-people-started-to-travel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postage_stamp
Photo by Miray Bostancı: https://www.pexels.com/photo/assorted-postcards-3234893/