Genesis - part 4

Articles In This Section:

· Genesis - part 1

· THE FIRST TEN YEARS

· ORIGIN OF USE OF POSTAGE STAMPS IN THE UNITED STATES

All such systems were open to the public and anyone might send a letter, the postal fees for which were "collect on delivery." By adopting simple codes persons could indicate the message within by using a pre-arranged form of address. Hence when the letter was offered by the courier, the person to whom it was addressed could read the message from the address and would then refuse the letter. The postal service would get nothing for such "deliveries." We need not wonder at these devious methods of cheating the posts when we view the cost of sending a letter. Each letter was charged for the distance it traveled — seldom less than sixpence and often several shillings, a sizable sum indeed in days when in all the land there was not a laborer earning as much as one dollar a day the year around!

Meanwhile James Watts had invented his mechanical monster — the steam engine — that was to change the living patterns of the whole world. And the industrial development of the world demanded establishment of a better postal system.

Sir Rowland Hill, creator of the first postage stamp.

In 1837 Sir Rowland Hill, after having completed exhaustive studies of the postal service then in effect, made public his revolutionary idea. This was, reduced to its simplest expression, merely the fact that it cost no more to deliver a letter a hundred miles than it did to deliver one a few city blocks. After three years of pushing his claims the idea was officially adopted and along with it the means of collecting postage in advance — the postage stamp.