Horseshoe stamp
The horseshoe stamp is a form of postmark used in Germany in the 19th century with the date of the day and an additional hour. This stamp is so named because of the similarity to the horseshoe . The first horseshoe stamp was in April 1864 in the post office in Cologne with the spelling “ Coeln ” at the time. Horseshoe stamps were in use in Prussia , the northern German postal district , Lübeck , Württemberg and Saxony . When the Deutsche Reichspost was founded in 1871, it was still used there. Some of these stamps were still in use until the 1880s. Except in the German areas, the stamp form still existed in Chile . There are two fundamentally different versions of this stamp, either with or without a bridge. The stamp with a bridge is called a stirrup stamp, and the two ends of the horseshoe outline are connected by a line.
history
As early as the 19th century, the time stamp on mail pieces played an increasingly important role. Especially in the case of larger post offices with a higher frequency of incoming and outgoing goods to be conveyed, as early as the late 1820s there was a move towards using stamping tools that had hours (so-called time groups).
From then on, hour stamps were used. This meant that there was a separate stamping tool for each hour to be documented. Later stamp tools with holding and plug-in devices were used. Since repositioning the letters was usually very cumbersome and took a lot of time, a more elegant solution was devised: The time groups were attached to a rotating roller and could be locked in place using a locking device.
In order to be able to print the time in the lower area with a roller in addition to the current date, of course a certain amount of space was required and since the mechanical possibilities were not that advanced at that time, the two-circle form of the German stamps, which was common at that time, had to be broken up and this is how it came about Horseshoe shape.
The horseshoe stamp was replaced by the Klaucke stamp named after its inventor Julius Klaucke .
literature
- Friedrich Spalink: The German horseshoe stamp. 4th improved edition 1992, Verlag Peter Feuser, Stuttgart, ISBN 3-927483-20-6
- Collector Express
- K. Krauss: 125 years of horseshoe stamp. Issue 18/1989, pages 701 to 703
- W. Bringmann: The horseshoe stamp of Prussia. Overview of all 24 stamp types. Issue 20/1985, pages 684 to 686
- K. Krauss: Found two other types of stamp. Issue 11/1986, page 366
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Karlfried Krauss: 125 years of horseshoe stamp. In: Collector Express , issue 18/1989, pages 701 to 703.
- ↑ a b c d horseshoe stamp. In: Philapedia, accessed February 12, 2012.
- ^ H. Niescher: Kleine Stempelkunde , Transpress Verlag, Berlin 1984, page 53 f.