One man's effort to make a better postal system

“I never felt there was any

great risk in starting new ventures.

The greatest risk was missing an

opportunity.â€�                                                                                                                        — Robert Noyce

As a high school student, I became interested in postage stamps from all over the world and from ancient times. I collected them, bought them and sold them. And after several years I wondered when postage stamps were introduced into society and what happened before they were introduced. The research was most interesting and it continues to make my mind wiggle when I think about the invention of the postage stamp.

Before the postage stamp came into use, English post offices handled the delivery of letters and packages in a rather unusual way. A letter, for example, would be in an envelope and the post office would measure its weight and assign a cost for its weight and distance of transportation. Then they would deliver it to the addressee.

The addressee, not the sender, was asked to pay for the delivery. And the costs were very high. It made many recipients worry and some refused to accept the mail.

Rowland Hill was the man who changed this completely. He was born in 1795 in a small town in western England. His father was a teacher in Birmingham. When he was 12 years old, Hill became a student-teacher in his father’s school. He taught astronomy. He earned money fixing scientific instruments.  

u           u           u

At the age of 24, Hill set up the Hazelwood School in a town named Edgbaston and he equipped the school with a swimming pool, a science laboratory, a library, and a series of gas-powered lights. Most other schools had nothing similar in their operation. He proposed making science a required course for schools. It did not take much time for students to come to the school from several other countries, and the school prospered. Several years later Hill moved the school to London, where it was even more successful.

Around this time, Hill was reported to have witnessed the attempted delivery of mail to a young woman. She did not have enough money to accept the mail and when the postmaster left with the mail in his hand she started to cry.

Hill asked her what had happened and why she was crying. She said she did not have enough money to pay for the letter, and she told him that the letter was from her fiancé, whom she had not seen for several months.

u           u           u

Hill’s mind responded to that event rather quickly, as it opened his eyes to a basic problem in the postal system structure. He wrote an article titled, “Postal  Reform, Its Importance and Practicability.â€� He passed it on to Lord Melbourne in 1837. The plan called for the post office to use pre-printed envelopes and adhesive postage stamps, a very big difference from how they worked at that time. The following is what his article focused on.

“Perhaps this difficulty for using stamped envelopes in certain cases might be obviated by using a bit of paper just large enough to bear the stamp and covered at the back with a glutinous wash, which the user might, by the application of a little moisture, attach to the back of the letter to avoid the necessity of re-directing it.�

A very important part of Hill’s article focused on setting up a uniform rate of one penny for each half-ounce of the letter. What this idea did was to make letters affordable for everyone and easy to transmit from sender to recipient. The idea also cut the accounting costs of the Royal Mail organization. They no longer had to keep records of each individual letter. And the back of the penny stamp could be licked to soften the sticky material there to allow the stamp to be attached easily to the envelope. This was a drastic change and it helped to enormously increase the number of letters sent each day.

u           u           u

When Hill appeared before the government with his postal reform plan, including penny stamps and printed envelopes, it was adopted and included in the Parliamentary budget in 1839. Printing started the following year and the stamps went on sale May 8, 1840. The “Penny Black� stamp was used for half-ounce letters, and full ounce letters used the “Two Penny Blue� stamp.

Originally stamps were printed in quantities on a large sheet of paper. There were no holes between the stamps to make it easy to tear the individual stamps apart. The stamps were cut apart by scissors, or torn apart by hand. It was not convenient.

Hill’s design provided that there be small holes lined up between the stamps in each direction. That made it much easier to tear the stamps apart without damaging them. That simple design has continued to this day.

In 1860 Queen Victoria knighted Hill as Knight Commander of Bath for his service to the British Empire, and he was also made a Fellow of the Royal Society. Hill died at his home in 1879.

Other countries began to imitate Hill’s designs. Here in the United States, you can now buy a sheet with 20 stamps on it, 10 on each side. You just peel off one stamp and stick it on your envelope. The stamp has glue on it and you don’t have to lick it. Very nice!

Sidney X. Shore is a scientist, inventor and educator who lives in Sharon and holds more than 30 U.S. patents.