One Cent Magenta Page 5

  Baum and Dallas wanted their provisional stamps to look like stamps. They pulled the image of a ship from among the cuts that would have been stowed away in any nineteenth-century print shop. Some postal historians have said that image appeared with the shipping news column in the Gazette, but the Gazette carried no such column in the 1850s.

  They probably ran off sheets of four, a two-by-two grid. That’s the best guess. No one knows. Philatelists have long wondered which position the one-cent magenta occupied before the sheet was cut and the stamps initialed by post office workers—in the case of the one-cent magenta, E.D. Wight. The initials were said to guard against fraud, though it is hard to imagine counterfeit stamps in British Guiana.

  Wight seemed not to care that a stamp he had handled and marked went on to become famous. When Sir Edward Denny Bacon, the unquestionably authoritative collector and curator, published a paper on the stamps of British Guiana, he said he had been assured that “Mr. Wight is still alive and living in the colony, but he is in his dotage and either cannot or will not remember anything about these old stamps except that he initialed them. He has been so pestered on the subject that the mention of old stamps to him is like a red rag to a bull.”

  FOUR

  Six Shillings

  1873: Found by a Twelve-Year-Old

  It was found seventeen years after it was issued, perhaps in an attic, perhaps in a closet, perhaps in a forgotten drawer—the details are fuzzy. The finder did not realize, when he grabbed the one-cent magenta and took it home to soak it off whatever it had been stuck to, that he had stumbled across something. And that created the kind of story that fueled long-shot dreams of fledgling stamp collectors who cracked the bindings on their brand-new stamp albums and plunged in, hoping to find that one precious stamp someday. It was like panning for gold, something else people did in British Guiana.

  Louis Vernon Vaughan, twelve years old and caught up in the then-new fad of stamp collecting, found that one precious stamp in 1873 but did not know it. He sold it for six shillings, or about $16.83 in today’s dollars. “The worst stamp swap in history,” the stamp writer Viola Ilma called it.

  Vaughan grew up to be a tax collector in British Guiana—he lived there all his life—and as an old man was teased about not striking it rich when he had the chance. The one-cent magenta “was always referred to as the one that got away,” one of his descendants told me.

  Vaughan found it at the house of an uncle. Andrew Hunter came from a line of resolute Scots who became sugar planters when they immigrated to British Guiana, but he had given up. He had moved to Barbados after forty-some years in British Guiana, and the house he left in British Guiana was a mess. Vaughan, tracked down by reporters long after the one-cent magenta had become famous, did not explain why Hunter had left behind so much junk that had to be cleaned out, only that the mess included “a whole lot of old family letters” with stamps that Vaughan could hardly wait to add to his album.

  Among them was the one-cent magenta, tattered-looking even then. Surely little Louis (“Louie” to his descendants) had memorized the stamps that had been issued in British Guiana—the provisionals that Dalton had commissioned over the years, as well as the regular issues that were printed in London. This was not one he recognized, and he was not impressed. The one-cent magenta’s “condition … would not be tolerated by discriminating collectors in a much commoner stamp,” the stamp experts L.N. and Maurice Williams wrote a century later.

  But Vaughan did not understand its rarity. From the first, he considered the one-cent magenta “a very ordinary one … not a particularly fine specimen,” and certainly not unique. “I was quite certain that it could easily be replaced by a better specimen when next I took the trouble to reach through the old family letters,” he told the London Daily Mail in 1934.

  He did not say when it dawned on him that he would never find another one-cent magenta, and there were other mysteries he did not explain. He certainly did not admit whether he had been responsible for the one-cent magenta’s strange shape—whether it was he who had snipped off the corners, or whether they were already gone when he found it. Vaughan the adult was as uninformative as Vaughan the boy had been impatient.

  The one-cent magenta “was not in my album for long,” he recalled. He wanted something—a batch of more attractive stamps that a dealer in England had sent him on approval. The dealer was Alfred Smith and Company, which had jumped on the stamp-collecting bandwagon in the 1860s, targeting boys like Vaughan with advertisements in magazines that reached throughout the English-speaking world. Smith believed in magazines. From 1863 to the mid-1870s, he and his partner, his brother Henry Stafford Smith, published the Stamp-Collector’s Magazine. (Another Smith, the early philatelic writer Bertram Tapscott Knight Smith, mentioned the Stamp-Collector’s Magazine and the Timbre-Poste of Brussels as “the foundation of all philatelic knowledge.” The Timbre-Poste would later provide a forum for charges that the one-cent magenta was a fake.)

  Addicts know the desperation of desire. Vaughan felt it as he thumbed through his album, thinking about new stamps he could buy. He probably had not seen the July 1, 1865, issue of Smith’s magazine, which carried an article about stamps from British Guiana. The article was written by Frederick Adolphus Philbrick, who used the pseudonym Damus Petimusque Vicissim, a play on the motto on stamps from British Guiana that means “we will now turn.”

  British Guiana came late to an endeavor whose origins are hazy—whoever picked up, sorted, and delivered the primordial mail is unknown. The Persian emperor Cyrus established a more or less permanent postal system in the sixth century BC, the first in recorded history. The Roman emperor Augustus developed post roads with relay stations stretching out from Rome and “public couriers,” but they were public in name only; they stood ready to carry official messages and nothing else. Centuries later Charlemagne pushed the nascent postal grid into Germany and France. Later still, kings and bishops relied on their own messengers until the mid-fifteenth century, when Franz von Taxis fashioned a monopoly on the mails that reached from Vienna to Brussels, the first lasting postal link between nations.

  The word “post” began to appear in English after Edward IV set up relay stations where messengers could change horses in the last years of the fifteenth century. “Post” was derived from a Middle French term for men on horseback responsible for transporting letters along a route and the relief riders who took over along the way.

  Britain’s General Post Office dates to the mid-seventeenth century, although the crown had conferred titles like “Master of the Posts” or “Chief Post-Master” long before that—and the royal posts served the royal family and their court but were allowed to carry the occasional private letter, so long as the carrier did not have to go out of his way to deliver it. That reflected the British preoccupation with efficiency. A seventeenth-century entrepreneur named William Dockwra recognized the need for speed. He promised delivery of letters that absolutely, positively had to go across London quickly. James E. Casey, who in 1907 founded, with a hundred borrowed dollars, the crosstown messenger operation in Seattle that became United Parcel Service, was just following in the footsteps of Dockwra and his men. Dockwra opened special receiving stations across a seven-mile stretch of London. His carriers collected letters on an hourly schedule, hustled them to sorting centers—one was in Dockwra’s own house—and hurried off to deliver them by hand.

  Dockwra’s biggest innovations involved the charges to customers. “Just a penny per item—regardless of the length of the letter,” Duncan Campbell-Smith wrote in his comprehensive account of the British postal system. Even more revolutionary was who paid the penny: the sender, not the recipient.

  Dockwra’s operation was “known to all as the Penny Post.” Dockwra himself called it a “New and Useful Invention,” and its success was immediate. So was its nationalization. Dockwra did not profit the way Casey did—in fact, he was hit with “a hefty fine for infringing on the Crown’s postal monopoly
” before his system was absorbed into the General Post Office (though it remained a separate unit and retained its penny pricing). Dockwra even had to fight for a pension.

  Through the eighteenth century, the main postal routes stretched out from London, but cross-country service remained iffy and rates prohibitive. The system was plagued by hard-to-calculate charges for the distance a letter had to be carried. Different clerks could arrive at different fees for letters to the same address. The bewildering rules, the confusing zones, the imponderable add-ons— the clerks had discretion, and they made mistakes. And mail became more expensive. Postal rates increased five times between 1784 and 1812. Sending a one-page letter cost a minimum of four pence (as much as $92.81 in today’s dollars), but because postage was calculated by distance, that initial charge took the letter only fifteen miles. It cost as much as fifteen pence, or as much as $347.81 in today’s dollars, to go five or six hundred miles.

  Postmarks were a much earlier invention. The credit apparently goes to Henry Bishop, Britain’s postmaster general in the late seventeenth century. A Bishop postmark was wordy and promotional: “The post for all Kent goes every night from the Round House, Love Lane, and comes every morning.” Mail sent through Dockwra’s system received two postmarks, but they were concise, for they served a purpose other than marketing. One read, “Penny Post Paid.” The other, in a heart shape, listed the time at which the letter was due at its destination. “Mor 11,” for example, for eleven o’clock in the morning, or “Af 3” for three o’clock in the afternoon.

  With the takeover by the national postal service came spelling errors like “Penny Post Payd” that surely had literate Londoners tut-tutting. Nor could the civil servants of the Post Office show their love. The heart-shaped postmark became circular.

  The list of the world’s serendipitous inventions is long. Consider these five: LSD, originally synthesized to boost circulation and respiration; corn flakes, originally made from bread dough left out too long; the microwave oven, reverse engineered because a candy bar melted. (The gooey mess appeared in the pocket of a scientist too close to the radar components he was testing.) And there are the twin V’s, Velcro and Viagra, the first developed by an electrical engineer who noticed stuck-together burrs in his pants, the other by researchers who observed a side effect of the heart drug they were working on.

  The case can be made that the modern postage stamp belongs on the list.

  Rowland Hill, who created it, was an ambitious schoolmaster who followed his father into teaching. He was also an amateur engineer—he had designed his school’s innovative central heating system and its observatory— and he was a painter, a sideline that would figure in postal history later on. But above all, he was a systems analyst, although no one used that term in the 1830s when Hill prepared a pamphlet called “Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability.”

  Perfectionist that he was, Hill assembled figures and facts that were “unpleasant,” the postal historian Laurin Zilliacus wrote, “but hardly surprising to the authorities or even the public.” He documented the stark reality of continually rising mail charges, declining revenues and substandard service. But improving the Post Office’s performance was not all that he had in mind. Hill was first and foremost an educator, and he had an educator’s vision of the role that an institution like the Post Office could play in British life. He cared less that the public was not getting its money’s worth. His concern was “the obstruction thus raised to the moral and intellectual progress of the people; and that the Post Office, if put on a sound footing, would assume the new and important character of a powerful engine of civilization.” The Post Office could function as a classroom beyond the classroom, promoting literacy and sensibility.

  But the Post Office did not want him behind the counter, much less making postal policy, just as it had not let him observe its operations from within: “I applied for permission to see the working of the London office, but was met by a polite refusal.” Smithsonian magazine’s website speculated that when they read Hill’s pamphlet, narrow-minded postal officials uttered “things like ‘crikey!’ and ‘I say!” and ‘what hufflepuffery’ and other exclamations popular among the blustery Victorian bureaucrat set.”

  It was as if he had called for an all-out intervention. Hill became a polarizing figure at the center of a national debate. The philatelist David Beech pointed out to me that others advocated reforms—he mentioned Sir Henry Cole, who invented commercial Christmas cards—but Hill is the one who is remembered. The Post Office’s chief secretary bellowed: “Fallacious, preposterous, utterly unsupported by facts and resting entirely on assumption.” But some influential Londoners were not so sure. “Mr. Place, a prominent citizen noted for his crusty temper and far from radical … views, took up the pamphlet ready to enjoy some snorts of indignation over the crackpot author,” Zilliacus reported. “His reading was at first interspersed with ‘Pish’ and ‘Pshaw.’” But by the last page, Hill had won him over, and he “turned his snorts on opponents.”

  Hill advocated monumental change: prepayment. Like Dockwra before him, Hill called for the sender to pay the postage—but now for all letters, not just those expedited by messengers. He fretted that the public would reject his startling departure from the time-honored custom of the recipient’s paying; he gambled that making the rate uniform and slashing it to a penny would “neutralize all pecuniary objection to its being invariably paid in advance.” Collecting postage on delivery was “an important incentive, it was thought, to the post boys” on the streets, but at best it made for sloppy accounting; at worst, it opened the door to corruption. The populist in Hill also wanted to address an unfairness he remembered from a childhood in a schoolteacher’s cash-poor household. “Every day that brought post-letters brought also a demand for payment, the postman waiting at the door till he had received his money,” he wrote. “In the very early period, when we were most straitened in means, his rap was not always welcome.” And there was junk mail even then, and he objected to the strain it put on the postal system and the financial pressure it put on addressees. “Tradesmen’s circulars, in particular, which sometimes came from a considerable distance, and always unpaid, were great causes of disappointment and irritation,” he wrote.

  It did not take much to see that people were giving the mailman the slip or that avoiding postage was a preoccupation of the rank and file. Hill quoted the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “One day, when I had not a shilling which I could spare, I was passing by a cottage … where a letter-carrier was demanding a shilling for a letter, which the woman of the house appeared unwilling to pay.” Coleridge stepped in and paid the money, but as soon as the postman was out of earshot, the woman told Coleridge he’d been had. “The letter was from her son, who took that means of letting her know that he was well”—he sent such letters regularly and never wrote anything inside. Together, Coleridge and the woman opened the letter, and sure enough, it was blank. (Hill eventually became so famous that some accounts mistakenly report it was Hill, not Coleridge, who happened by and paid the tab on the empty letter.)

  That was hardly the only dodge. Hill complained that “hundreds, if not thousands, of newspapers were annually posted which no one particularly cared to read.” What people read were the wrappers, on which they wrote their private codes. Hill detailed the ciphers that a grocer in Edinburgh had worked out with a friend in London. There were six different ways for the friend to write the grocer’s name. Each told something about the price of items that fluctuated. Variations on the address—“Street” or “St.”—provided additional information about whether to mark up the prices of merchandise the grocer already had on hand in anticipation of the next, more expensive shipment.

  Hill also argued that the postal system catered to the haves over the have-nots. One target was franking, the privilege of sending mail without having to pay postage (the term frank came from the Latin francus, for free). Franking was available to many British officials—and thro
ugh them to people who were not using the mail for government business. Lawmakers in the United States later tried to ward this off with statutes making it a crime to use government mail for anything that is not official. But in Hill’s London, it seemed that anyone with a friend in Parliament could easily get his mail franked; those who needed free postage the least abused the privilege the most. Hill complained that “members of the favoured classes” had sent everything from a piano to actual people— specifically, two “maid servants”—and all kinds of animals: at least one cow, a horse, and hounds.

  Even more significant than proposing prepayment and doing away with franking, Hill suggested abolishing the distance-based rates. What he said that Britain needed was a flat nationwide rate of a single penny. Birmingham to Edinburgh? One penny, the same as for London to Oxford.

  Barred from looking at the Post Office’s ledgers, Hill tallied what losses he could. He figured that mail “refused, mis-sent or redirected” cost the Post Office £122,000 or as much as $629.3 million in today’s dollars. Startling as those numbers were, another number that Hill came up with was startling because it was so small: one thirty-sixth of a penny. That, according to Hill’s calculations, was the most it cost the Post Office to transport a letter from London to Edinburgh —and it did not cost much more to move one piece of mail from Plymouth to Newcastle upon Tyne. But the postage from London to Edinburgh was one shilling and one penny, and Hill, always focused on efficiency, was unhappy that the Post Office wasted time calculating the mileage for each letter.

  Hill had friends in Parliament who pushed for his changes, and the post office was overhauled according to Hill’s blueprint, even as postal officials took issue with his notion of supply and demand—that lowering postage rates would drive up volume and revenue, because more people could afford to send more letters. Hill was indeed wrong about that: revenue went into a nosedive and took nearly a decade to crawl to break-even levels. But public attention had shifted to the innovation that Hill had played down, if he even foresaw its potential—the postage stamp.