Dear LPG

I am betting that older people use stamps a lot more than any other section of our community.  I know that, in spite of my newly found computer skills, many of my friends would not know what to do with an email.

Did you know that we have had the power to put a stamp on a letter for exactly 180 years today?  I know that none of us can claim to have been around in 1840, but we have Sir Rowland Hill to thank for this idea which made getting letters from one place to another more practical and affordable at a time when there were another 36 years to go before the invention of the telephone in 1876, and the conception of the first computer would take another 96 years to become anything like reality.

The concept of sending letters from ‘A to B’ had, by then, been the practise of those that could afford to indulge for at least 160 years before the day in question.  According to the internet, before the invention of this little stamp, the receiver of mail had to pay for their letters.  So the indignance that I have felt on the odd occasion when I received one without a stamp was commonplace for quite a while, but that little stamp changed everything.  There had been a postal service from as early as 1680 but, prior to 1840, it appeared that sending a letter was a very expensive business with the price of receiving your post depending on how far it had travelled to get to you.  

As ever there are a variety of commemorative coins and their values differ as widely as that of the Penny black stamps that have stood the test of time, but it is interesting to think that the cost of sending a letter has been one of the smallest slaves to inflation. 

Having taken a look at an online inflation calculator, I have worked out that inflation taken into consideration, we would now have to pay the equivalent of about £1.03 for sending a letter with a penny black stamp (if they were still in use).  Perhaps that is worth thinking about the next time we part with our 70p for a first class stamp, although there will have been a budget between the time I am writing and the day of this anniversary. 

TG, Lee

TG has found some related information…

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