Like most inventions, the postage stamp was invented to solve a problem. That problem was that post in Britain was paid for by the recipient and not the sender.
Before the invention of the stamp, somebody would take a letter or a parcel to the postal service. The postal service would decide how much it would cost to deliver the item. The poster could then pay the price and “PAID” would be stamped on the letter or parcel. This is where the word stamp comes from. There is some suggestion that people felt paying the price in advance was insulting to the recipient because it implied that they couldn’t afford to pay. This meant that more often than not the recipient would pay that price on delivery. This made sense from the poster’s point of view because they wouldn’t want to pay for a service before it had been carried out. However, it caused problems for the postal service because the recipient didn’t always want to pay for the item. The postal service lost a lot of money.
Incidentally, as a fascinating aside, postal services have existed since 2400 BC. A corps of royal couriers spread the decrees of the Egyptian pharaohs throughout Egypt and the service may even be older than that. There was also a system of post houses that provided a mounted courier service. Not many people could read and write then, so I doubt the service was used too much.
In 1680, William Dockwra, an English merchant, and his partner Robert Murray came up with a system to solve this problem. They started the London Penny Post. For the price of one penny, which is a little over a dollar in modern money, they would deliver a letter or a small parcel anywhere within the city of London. The city of London was a lot smaller then than it is now. When someone paid, the letter or parcel was stamped and delivered. This system worked, at least within that area, and is considered to be the world’s first postage stamp.
In 1836, Rowland Hill was tasked with sorting out the British Post Office. It was losing money and needed substantial reform. It had become mismanaged, wasteful, expensive, and slow. As Britain was industrializing, the need to send letters and mail was increasing, but the postal service was not evolving in time.
One of Hill’s recommendations was that postage for letters and parcels could be paid up front, by using “a bit of paper just large enough to bear the stamp, and covered at the back with a glutinous wash.” And that is the postage stamp. Hill released his report to the public and he suggested that postage should be paid depending on the weight of the item being posted. His ideas were accepted by the government and the first stamps were sold on May 1st, 1840.
Sir Roland Hill is credited as being the inventor of the postage stamp, but he was not the first person to come up with the idea. He may have come up with it independently, or he may have been building on knowledge that was spreading in Europe at the time. In Greece, a 40 lepta black stamp was in use in 1831. Some people claim that this is the first postage stamp, but it is more likely that it was a receipt for a donation of money to the government. Still, it brought about the idea of putting a price on a paper stamp.
A Swedish colonel, Curry Gabriel Treffenberg, came up with the idea of paid postage stamps in 1823. He write a proposal to the Assembly of Swedish Nobels, but they weren’t interested. His idea seems to be more a prepaid sheet of letter paper with a stamp already inked onto it, but it is another step in the right direction.
In 1835, an Austrian civil servant, Lovrenc Kosir, came up with the idea of artificially affixed postal tax stamps. He proposed the idea to his government, but they weren’t interested. He suggested the idea of selling the stamps in books and making them so thin that they couldn’t be peeled off and reused. He claimed that his idea had been passed to Rowland Hill, but there is no proof of that.
So, whether Rowland Hill came up with the idea on his own, or whether he improved an idea he had heard about, is impossible to know. However, he was the driving force behind the uptake of the postage stamp, and he certainly deserves the credit. The government were against Hill’s idea at first, as well. When he published his report, though, a group of merchants, traders, and bankers came together to petition for his ideas to be taken up. They knew that the postal service needed to be reformed to help their business.
The introduction of the postage stamp rapidly and drastically increased the amount of letters that were sent. Hill had said that if the postage cost was low enough that even the poor could afford it, the number of letters would increase, and he was right. Other industries sprang up as well. For the first time, ready made envelopes became necessary and a machine to make them was invented. Perforated stamps soon appeared. A few years later, country names were added to the stamp as the use of postal stamps spread around the world. And this is what I learned today.
Photo by Brett Jordan: https://www.pexels.com/photo/20-banknote-on-brown-wooden-table-7462697/
Sources:
https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-stamps-1992419
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postage_stamp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_office
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Post_Office
https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/stamps-postcards.htm
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/stamps-what-an-idea-148588334/
http://websites.umich.edu/~ece/student_projects/money/denom.html