The Penny Black and pre-paid post
Before 1840, the person who received a letter paid for it. One reformer thought that made no sense.
Imagine receiving a letter and being asked to pay before you could read it. For much of history, that was how mail worked in Britain. The cost depended on the distance and the number of sheets, and the recipient paid.
This had obvious problems. Postage was expensive. People sometimes refused letters because they could not afford them, or because they had agreed on a secret code with the sender that let them read the news from the outside of the envelope, without paying.
A reformer#
A British teacher and social reformer named Rowland Hill studied the system and argued that it was slow, costly and wasteful. He proposed a radical change in 1837: charge a low flat rate, based on weight and not distance, and have the sender pay in advance.
He argued that the real cost of carrying a letter was mostly in handling it, not in the distance travelled. Cheaper postage, he thought, would lead to far more letters.
The stamp#
To show that postage had been paid, a small adhesive label would be stuck on the letter. The first was issued in 1840: the Penny Black, a stamp showing a profile of Queen Victoria, costing one penny for a letter up to a certain weight.
A red version, the Penny Red, replaced it a year later, because cancellation marks were hard to see on the black.
What happened#
Mail volumes rose sharply. Within a few years, many more people were writing letters. Other countries soon introduced their own stamps, and the idea spread across the world.
What to take from it#
Often, the way a system is set up is accepted without question, even when it makes little sense. Hill looked at the process, saw who was paying and why, and proposed a simple change that turned out to benefit everyone.
Next time something seems awkward, it is worth asking: why is it done this way? The answer might just be habit.