New Delhi: Google is marking the 175th anniversary of the Penny Black stamp with a doodle in its home pages in Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom and Canada.
The Penny Black was first issued in Britain on May 1, 1840 and was the world's first adhesive postage stamp used in a public postal system. The stamp featured a profile of Queen Victoria.
Google has posted this brief description of the doodle and the Penny Stamp on its doodle page:
Before 1st May 1840, posting a letter was a very complicated and expensive affair. It could cost the equivalent of a days wage, and it was charged by how many sheets of paper were used and how far it had to travel. Normally the recipient had to pay the cost.
Sir Roland Hill was responsible for reforming the British postal system, and as part of this a competition was held for the public to design the world's first adhesive postage stamp. However none of the entries were thought suitable, so instead they used the profile sketch of a then 15 year old Queen Victoria. This image was used on stamps until the end of her reign. Because the Penny Black was the first postage stamp in the world, it did not show a country of origin, and to this day British stamps are the only stamps in the world that do not state what country they are from.
However, the Penny Black only remained in circulation for a year, as it was soon found that it was possible to remove the ink of the red cancellation mark and re-use the stamp, so the Treasury switched to the Penny Red and black cancellation ink.
A Sotheby's employee holds a Penny Black stamp dated from 1840 (Getty Images)
Comments
0 comment