Watermarks are a design that are put in paper by the manufacturer to identify the paper as their product. They are an outgrowth of the earliest paper which is called laid paper. Laid paper is produced by allowing the paper pulp particles to coagulate on a bed that is a screen made up of closely knit small parallel rods of metal. The pulp coalesces in a pattern of thickness and thinness that mimics the bed that it was made on. When paper technology advanced and paper was produced on a cloth bed (where the fibers had been woven-thus "wove" paper) paper had no thick-thin variance within the sheet. Paper makers found that they could put a pattern in the cloth bed that the paper was formed on and, when the fibers settled, the pattern would show up in reverse as an area where the paper was thinner. These were the first watermarks.
When stamps were first proposed the major objection to their being issued was fear
