Issued on May 1, 1840, changed the whole postal system in use at that time.
No
longer the one who received the mail had to pay, but the sender could
buy a 'stamp' to pay for sending a message over mail to another person.
The first stamp did not bear any name of country, as it was issued in the UK only.
This
privilege is still valid until today, as the United Kingdom, is the
only country in the world, that has no country name mentioned on it's
stamps.
 |
| 1840 Black Penny |
The first stamp came in sheets of 240 stamps. 24 rows of 12 stamps. Nowadays, stamps are often printed in sheets of 100 or an equivalent of 100's. But in 1840, the British were not using the decimal system yet.
A 'pound' (£) used to be the value of a pound of silver (= 0.45359237 kg).
1 pound was devided into 20 shillings, and one shilling devided into 12 pence each.
Although the decimal system is more logical (we have 10 fingers), this predecimal system had many advantages too, as 240 can be divided by 2,3,4,5,6,8,10,15,16,20,24,30,40,60, 80 and 120, where '100' only can be divided by 2,4,5,10,20,25 and 50.
The sheet of 240 stamps of this black penny, have letters in the lower corners. Each combination depends on the position on the sheet.
Each row of 12 makes one shilling, twenty rows of 1 shilling, make one pound.
position of black pennies in a sheet
The letter left on the stamp, indicates the row, and the one right the column.
The stamp shown above (B J) is therefore in position 22.
Although each stamp on the sheet has the same value, the ones in with double letters, i.e. AA, BB, CC, ... are sought. Stamps in the border of the sheet, often have better margins, some even with extra information.
From this issue, 286,670 sheets were printed, good for over 68,8 million black pennies. Estimated is, that about 1,3 million of them survived time.
