The Penny Post

[A] Before 1840, sending a letter in Britain was expensive and the recipient paid. Charges varied with distance and with the number of sheets, so a clerk had to weigh, measure and calculate before anything could move. [B] Rowland Hill proposed replacing the whole apparatus with a single low rate, paid in advance by the sender, anywhere in the country.

The objection was obvious: a uniform penny would lose money on long journeys. [C] Hill's answer was that almost none of the cost of a letter lay in carrying it. The expense was in the accounting - the assessment at one end, the collection at the other, and the letters refused by recipients who would not pay. Remove that, and the carriage itself was nearly free. [D] He was right, though not in the way he expected. Revenue fell at first and took years to recover, but the volume of post rose so sharply that the service reached a scale nobody had planned for, and other countries copied the system within a decade. The adhesive stamp, which is the part everyone now remembers, began as an administrative afterthought.