Robert Dickie

Formerly a British postage stamp machine

Robert James Dickie (born December 30, 1876 in London , England , † 1958 in Wellington , New Zealand ) was a British- born New Zealand inventor. He is one of the first inventors of postage stamp machines .

Life

Robert James Dickie was born in London on December 30, 1876. When he was 12, his parents immigrated with him to New Zealand, where they settled in Wellington . Dickie got a job at the Chief Post Office on Customs Street in Wellington in 1891 and later moved to the international mail department.

It was due to the fact that at that time every postal worker had to go through all departments of the postal organization and Dickie found himself selling stamps at the post office counter. He saw it as a complete waste of time, especially since most postage stamps that were sold had the same value. The thought that this activity could be done better and faster by a machine never let go of him. However, it was another 13 years before he was able to turn his plan of building a stamp machine into a reality.

Invention of the postage stamp machine

Dickie got support from the photographer and draftsman JH Brown , who put Dickie's idea on paper and made detailed drawings. They later brought in the engineer W. Andrews , who was to design the machine. In 1905 the first prototype was ready, patented by the three and presented to the New Zealand postal authority. But she initially rejected the invention, as it was feared that the coins it contained would be stolen. In addition, one now had to produce postage stamps in roll form instead of the usual sheets of paper. Since the government printing company was not ready to print stamps on roll paper because they feared too high costs, Dickie became active himself and proved himself to be an entrepreneur. He bought the stamps from the Post Office himself, cut the blocks into strips, glued them together to form a roll and from June 1905 onwards sold them in his machine in Wellington . After a short time it had to be dismantled because the users had damaged it by attempting to manipulate it. An upgraded version went live a month later and sold 3901 one-penny postage stamps in the first 14 days  .

In 1906 Dickie came into business with the Tasmanian Georgine Kermode on a US business trip to San Francisco , to whom he left the distribution of the machine in continental Europe, while he himself wanted to sell the machine in the USA, Great Britain , Australia and New Zealand. In 1907, Dickie sought sales rights in Great Britain and set up one of his machines in the lobby of the House of Commons , where the machine attracted a lot of attention. His first machines were produced in the UK and imported to New Zealand. There they were initially only used in Wellington . In 1910 the post office bought more machines and used them more and more nationwide. Only when the demand was great enough did the New Zealand government buy the rights to have the stamp machines produced in New Zealand.

1909, Dickie its machines on the World Expo Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition in Seattle from, where she won the gold medal and the Grand Prize.

In 1938 Dickie visited a factory in Great Britain that produced his postage stamp machines. The factory employed around 800 people at the time and around 18,000 machines were in service on the island during this time. When Dickie retired at 55, one of his devices was in every post office in New Zealand.

Dickie died in Wellington in 1958 at the age of 82 . His postage stamp machines continued to do their job until 1960, when they could no longer be used due to a change in money and were replaced by new, other machines.

literature

• Helga Neubauer: Dickie, Robert (1876-1958) . In: The New Zealand Book . 1st edition. NZ Visitor Publications , Nelson 2003, ISBN 1-877339-00-8 , pp. 1079 .

Web links

• Donald Reid : Robert J Dickie . In: NZEDGE . Brian Sweeney , June 24, 2007, accessed October 11, 2017 .