POSTAGE STAMPS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VIII, Issue 655, 28 March 1914, Page 7

POSTAGE STAMPS.

THEIR EARLY DAYS. Ninety nine out of every hundred I":rsc-ns would probably ascribe the honour of having invented the postage to Rowland Hill, but every one; of thriii .. ould be wrong. It was J .ill v. ho lij'st. brought to the notice 01' the Post OUice Coramissioncrs this' useful method of simplifying! the transportation of letters, but as a m:iT.UT of fact the stamp had been invented several" years before by Mr. harass f hahners. of.DiAsdee, who in f»t, 1834, experimented with an r.tlhcsive label for the franking of correspondence. Hill did not think of stamps until the beginning of the year 1837, and it is remarkable that up to that time,-and, indeed, not till November of the same year, hadChalmers made any public mention at all of the labels he had actually printed and gummed three years earlier. Even Chalmers, however, was not first in the field with the_idea of frank'ing letters at the beginning of their journey instead of at the end of 'it. So early as the year 1653 a post-card envelope was in use in Paris, and it is remarkable that no further step seems to have been taken in this ;■ direction until the early part of the nineteenth century. In 1818 stamped postal letter-paper var. issued by the Government to the public of the Sardinian States, and ,;t. allied postal envelopes were adopted in the same country two years later. These, for some reajon or other, were discontinued, it corns, in 1J.836. In the meantime stamped wrappers for newspapers had neon introduced in England by Mr. Charles Whiting, who-in the year 1830 brought them -to public notice under the name of '''go-frees,'' but whether they were then officially recognised seems doubtful. Four years later Mr. Charles Knight addressed a letter to Lord Althorp, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, recommending similar wrappers for general adoption, the idea, as he believed, being " entirely novel, Whiting's stamped wrapper.! never having come , under Wis notice. But it remained For *T-lill to be successful ato last in m o - .i£:in<r the authorities to the* many ailvr.ntii.aos incidental to the franlii.oi letters by the sender. • r ; !i it was that in the year 1840 , l!\o h:::fcory of the postage stamp r.toixr -.began, and it was that yfar so" v.lilch saw the introduction of 'h.: famous Mtilready envelope. Adiufj.ve stamps, stamped letter-paper n": i the Mu I ready envelope all came i'-.t o use on the Ist of May in that n -rc-at was the unrnc-i-iate appreciation of thfj public that ii. -.hi vaV.'e. of £2,500 v.v.re ' I Lie i'irst day of issue. But tho ?.l'..ircr.dy envelope, in spite of its attractiveness, soon lost popularity, c.nd tha Post Office, finding that it 'was unsaleable, actually destroyed thousands of those works of art v.liich to-day are considered almost priceless in the eyes of the stampled or. The demand for the adhesive labels. as they were still c-.Mfd, was. however, so great that tho hnl.'-rniUion a day which were printed proved- quite insufficient for thD public need. The u'niverral Penny postage to -all- -parts of the kin gdom had then been in operation only a few months, and although, as H'ill (had prophesied, it was a success from the first, the introduction of the penny postage stamp nr.;:;t -have given to the new system an impetus such as neither the inventor nor the Posti Office can ever have dreamed of. Stamps of various denominations were afterwards. printed, but it was D not until the year. 1853 that the perforation of sheets of postage stamps was thought of. In that year'the Government paid to the inventor of the first, efficient' perforating, machine, '•Tr. Henry" Archer, no less a sum than C4,000.-r-"Globe."