Telegraph brand
Telegraph stamps are stick-on stamps issued by private or state telegraph services to confirm payment of the telegram fee (or payment ).
history
The first state telegraph stamps appeared in British India in 1861 , but stamps of the private English and Irish Magnetic Telegraph Co. had already appeared in 1853 .
Not all countries have issued telegraph brands; brands of around 60 states are known. Since post and telegraph service were often combined in one authority, postage stamps were also used to confirm the telegram fees. These can then be recognized by the special cancellations (telegraph stamp, perforations).
With the spread of the telephone in private households, the importance of the telegram and thus of the telegraph brands declined sharply in the first half of the 20th century. Probably the last telegraph stamps were issued by Honduras and the Dominican Republic in the mid-1990s .
use
There are two types of telegraph brands that differ in their use. Telegraph stamps that were stuck to the delivery form of a telegram or a delivery receipt and canceled with a stamp, perforation or lettering, were used exclusively to confirm the amount paid for a telegram. In some countries two-part stamps were issued, the consignor received one half on a receipt, the other half was stuck on the telegram form. This practice was common for example in Argentina , India and Uganda .
Another type of telegraph stamp was not used by the telegraph office but by the post office. In places without a telegraph office, the Post acted as an agent for the telegraph service. Customers could send a telegram to the post office, which would post it to the next location with a telegraph office. For this purpose, telegraph stamps in the amount of the telegram fee were attached to the envelope. Since the Post had collected fees due to the telegraph service, the latter presented the envelopes with telegraph stamps to the competent postal authorities to reimburse these fees. After a retention period, these envelopes were destroyed to prevent misuse. These "offset stamps" include, for example, the first state telegraph stamps of British India (1861).
Telegraph stamps were often issued in high denominations. If the post office lacked such values, state telegraph stamps were occasionally accepted as postage stamps . This practice is known from Western Australia and some South and Central American countries.
Collecting telegraph stamps
Compared to postage stamps and fiscal stamps , telegraph stamps are nowadays only noticed by a few collectors. Telegraph stamps that were used as offset stamps for the post office or telegraph stamps officially approved as postage stamps are listed in stamp catalogs and in good condition achieve high prices at auctions. In contrast, the high denominations of postage stamps that were used as telegraph stamps and have special telegraph stamps are more common than items used for postal purposes and are often traded at a discount.
literature
- Ullrich Häger: Large encyclopedia of philately . Bertelsmann, Gütersloh, 1973, p. 468. ISBN 3-570-03229-9
