Penny Black
Looking at stamps, letters, cards and other postal ephemera over the past months I began to wonder, when did this all begin? Have there been letters, stamps, postal services throughout history?
I remembered being fascinated by Sumerian cuneiform tablets at the British museum, many of them business records, but some, actual correspondence between those that could read and write.
In Egypt couriers and carrier pigeons brought letters back and forth between nobles, and in China and Persia the first formal postal services were established across whole Empires. These relied on postal offices, incorporated systems for writing precise destinations, and used horses with stages to get the post to its recipient quickly. The Mongols elaborated and extended the Chinese system to stretch across other areas of Asia.
The Roman Empire built a system on the Persian model and efficiently posted messages across the vast Empire. Later, in Byzantium, the writing of letters was considered a form of literature. In Europe religeous orders had their own postal systems and Charlemagne established a network throughout his Empire.
Some of the first public postal services available to all were in the Holy Roman Empire, Portugal, in the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and in Great Britain. In 1635 the Royal Mail was established allowed all citizens to send post throughout the kingdom.
The first real postage stamp was created in Great Britain in 1840. The Penny Black, as it was named, was intended as a method of standardizing postage costs, making the sending of letters much cheaper than before, and stimulating trade. The year before the Penny Black was introduced around 76 million letters were sent in Britain, and within a decade this had risen to 350 million a year in 1850.
The postage stamp revolutionized communication between people and businesses, and the system was quickly adopted by governments everywhere. By 1860 they were in use in 90 countries around the world. It was possible for even the relatively poor to send a letter across the world to Australia, China, India, the Americas or virtually anywhere.
