Please Mr. Postman...

...send me a letter.

It's getting to that time of year when the postman's (or should it be post person's?) bags will start filling up with cards. I'm not a stamp collector, not that there is anything wrong with that. These are for a project I had started in the summer and yet to finish.

Looking on the www I found out that mail used to be paid for by the recipient, but some recipients refused to pay. An English schoolmaster, Rowland Hill, proposed prepaid stamps in a pamphlet called The Post Office Reform. On 1 May 1840, the first stamps went on sale in Britain. They were the One-Penny Black and Twopence Blue stamps, featuring Queen Victoria. In 1870, the British Post Office introduced a half penny stamp for sending cards. Three years later the Christmas card was invented.

To separate the stamps in the pamphlet you needed to cut them up yourself. An Irish engineer, Henry Archer, devised a machine to create the perforated edges and by 1854 Archer's machine was sufficiently perfected to produce the first perforated stamps.

Here endeth today's lesson :)