History of Postage Stamp

The world's initial stamp was the Penny Black the adhesive postage stamp and the uniform postage rate were devised in Great Britain by James Chalmers around 1834. The same ideas were brought forward by Lovrenc Kosir, a Slovenian postal clerk at the Viennese court in 1835, but did not meet a positive reply. Later, the concept of the adhesive postage stamp was published by Rowland Hill, in Postal Reform: its Importance and Tractability in 1837. In it he argued that it would be better for the sender to pay the cost of release, rather than the addressee who could refuse the letter if they could not or did not want to pay, as sometimes happened at the time. He also argued for a uniform rate of one penny per letter, no matter where its destination. Accounting costs for the government would thus be cut; postage would no longer be charged according to how far a letter had traveled, which required each letter to have an individual entry in the Royal Mail's accounts. Chalmers' ideas were lastly adopted by Parliament in August, 1839 and the General Post Office launched the Penny Post service the next year in 1840 with two prepaid-postage pictorial envelopes or wrappers: one valued at a penny and one valued at two pence.

Three months shortly the first prepaid-postage stamp, known as the Penny Black was issued with the profile of Queen Victoria printed on it. Because the United Kingdom issued the first stamps, the Universal Postal Union grants it an exception from its rule that the recognition of the issuing country must appear on a stamp in Roman script for use in international mails. Previous to joining the U.P.U. many countries did not do this; there are very few violations of the rule since this time, though one example is the U.S. Pilgrim Tercentenary series, on which the country designation was involuntarily excluded. Because of this the numerous early issues of China and Japan often confound new collectors unfamiliar with Oriental scripts. A stamp must also show a face value in the issuing country's currency. Some countries have issued stamp with a letter of the alphabet or designation such as "First class" for a face value. Because of the U.P.U. rules their use is constrained to domestic mail, but breach of this rule is often tolerated. Exceptions to this are the British "E" stamp and the South African "International Letter Rate" stamp.