Treasury competition

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

As part of the British postal reform has been approved by the Treasury one of the UK competition advertised as one might do best indicated that for a letter the postage has been paid. The result was the stamp in its present form.

The tender

The invitation was issued on August 23, 1839. The invitation to artists, scientists and the public was published on September 6 by the Times . It called on the people of the United Kingdom to come up with suggestions and ideas on how to indicate that postage had been prepaid for a letter. £ 200 was suspended for the first prize and £ 100 for the second. The submission date should be October 15th of the year.

The result

Over 2,600 proposals were submitted, but only a few concerned stick-on stamps ( postage stamps ). Rowland Hill should choose from these suggestions. The prices have been expanded. Benjamin Cheverton, Henry Cole, and Charles Whiting received £ 100 each, and James Bogardus and Francis Coffin each received £ 50 for a joint entry.

However, Rowland Hill found none of the proposals ideal, although he adopted some ideas for his own design. Most of the designs were lost over time, but those by Charles Whiting - thanks in part to his own initiative - have survived for a long time and can still be shown today.

The implementation

One of the ideas that Rowland Hill adopted for the later One Penny Black brand is the machine-controlled background of the brand image. Another idea concerns the corner letters to protect against counterfeiting - this was also adopted by Hill.

Proposals for combined embossing and steel intaglio then arrived at a different time when the postal stationery for execution.

Hill took over the idea from Benjamin Cheverton of printing 240 labels on a sheet of paper so that the post office workers didn't have to do a lot of calculations: a whole sheet cost 1 pound, a row of 12 stamps a shilling. This practical idea was also taken into account in the Penny Black.

A number of important prerequisites were created when, on May 6, 1840, the world's first postage stamp, the Penny Black, could be affixed to letters as a marking for prepaid postage.