Postage stamps were invented to deal with a problem: how to pay for the delivery of mail. In Victorian times the population was growing fast and many more people wanted to send letters. The government wanted to send out letters, too – to claim tax and for other official purposes. Before this paying for delivery was a very complicated business. It was the person receiving the letter who paid, not the sender. Imagine if that were still true in today’s world of advertising mail (‘junk mail’)! So how could it all be simplified?

In the 1830s, the postage stamp – proof that you had paid for the delivery – did not exist. Gradually, the idea developed that you should be able to pay a single amount for delivery, and that the proof of postage should be fixed to the letter or parcel. This meant that there had to be a sticky label of some kind.

As a result of much debate, the first postage stamp – a piece of paper just big enough to carry a stamp – was introduced in 1840. You will see later, that the first stamps did not have perforations, so they had to be cut from a sheet. And you had to put the glue on the back yourself. Those things we take for granted today were to come later. But the stamps did start with a profile of Queen Victoria.

Because Britain was the first country in the world to use postage stamps, no one thought there was any need to put the name of the country on the stamp and the United Kingdom is the only country that still does not put its country name on its stamps, but always carries the monarch’s head instead.

Stamps were perforated from 1854 It did not take long for other countries to see what a good system this was and they quickly followed. Switzerland and Brazil had stamps in 1843. What was interesting about Brazil is that it chose not to carry the head of the monarch, so that the cancelling stamp (the round ink stamp used by post offices) would not disfigure the monarch’s image. The first national American stamps came in 1847, with 5 and 10 cent stamps showing Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. By the 1860s most countries had stamps.

The postal history of the United States did not get underway until after the Revolutionary War, when a national postal system was established. But this used stampless letters, paid for by the receiver. The first public postal system began with the introduction of gummed postage stamps, first issued by the U.S. Government Post Office July 1, 1847 with values of five and ten cents.