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One other American vacation that’s celebrated on July 1 is Nationwide Postage Stamp Day. It commemorates the issuance of the primary U.S. postage stamp, the Two-Cent Blue, on July 1, 1847. The stamp was designed by James B. Longacre and featured a portrait of Benjamin Franklin.
The Two-Cent Blue is likely one of the most well-known postage stamps, but it surely wasn’t the primary. The primary adhesive postage stamp, the Penny Black, was issued in the UK on Could 1, 1840. The Penny Black was designed by Rowland Hill, a British schoolmaster who’s credited with inventing the postage stamp. Hill’s concept was to create a system the place mailers would prepay postage, slightly than having the recipient pay for it upon supply. This technique made mail extra reasonably priced and environment friendly, and it rapidly caught on around the globe.
Within the early days, postage stamps have been manufactured from paper and weren’t perforated. This made them troublesome to make use of, as they needed to be reduce by hand. In 1854, the primary perforated stamps have been issued in Switzerland. Perforation made it a lot simpler to make use of stamps, and it rapidly turned the usual.
If you wish to have fun Nationwide Postage Stamp Day (whether or not you reside in the US or not) you’ll be able to:
- go to your native publish workplace, appears at and purchase some stamps
- write a letter or card and mail it
- design your individual stamp with a clean stamp coloring web page (like this one from Eduprints)
- coloration in stamp coloring pages — Mr. Nussbaum has a group of the 50 states stamp coloring pages, that are simply so cute!
- begin a postage stamp assortment or try the gathering of the US Postal Museum
- study some stamp details — for instance, do you know the costliest postage stamp ever offered was a British Guiana 1c Magenta, which offered for $9.5 million in 2014?
- do some fake play publish workplace play — little youngsters love placing “stamps” on envelopes and writing “letters”
[Photo via Kenmore Stamp]
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