When Rowland Hill invented the postage stamp, he made no provision for the separation of stamps on sheets. All stamps were issued imperforate, without perforations between stamps, with cutting the only means of separation. Hill did not expect that his stamps would prove all that popular; rather, he believed that his letter sheets and preprinted postage-paid envelopes, the Mulreadys, would be the choice of the postal-using public. He was wrong, probably for two reasons. First, the use of stamps, rather than prepaid envelopes— called by philatelists postal stationery— allows the user considerably more freedom in the size and shape of his envelope. Stamps also allow businesses, certainly the largest users of the post in Hill’s day as well as in our own, to have return addressed envelopes (called corner cards by philatelists). Second and more important, the design of the Mulready stationery was perceived as ludicrous by the English public. Its detractors, led by Punch, the English humor magazine, called the allegorized figures ridiculous; even its supporters could only muster faint praise for its busy beauty. Within weeks of its issue on May 6, 1840, parodies or caricatures appeared. These caricatures were sold in stationery shops, primarily as a jest, but some Londoners put stamps on them and mailed them to friends and relatives who might not have seen them. (Today such jests, if postally used, sell for upward of $5,000.)
Within weeks, it was clear even to Hill, the Mulready’s greatest supporter, that his postage stamp was to prove far more popular than his stationery. But the stamps, because they needed to be cut apart, posed problems for large users. Business firms often would place several sheets on a table and use a razor to cut the sheet into strips, then into singles. This separated the stamps effectively, if slowly. From a stamp collector’s point of view, such haphazard cutting of stamps frequently left the stamps with no margins; or, even worse, cut well into the stamp’s design.
It was obvious to all but Rowland Hill that a means of separating stamps from their sheets had to be found. One employee of the British Post Office Department said that Hill could not be counted on to support any proposal for postal change unless he had thought of it first. Nonetheless, Hill did come around in 1852, during hearings on the matter, to mildly endorse the convenience of easy separation, saying: “I do not speak strongly upon the matter; my opinion is that it could be useful and acceptable to the public to a certain extent.”
But how should this separation be done? There were basically two possibilities: perforation, the technique by which tiny holes are cut out of the paper between the stamps; and rouletting, the method by which tiny cuts are made in the paper so that when folded the paper will easily separate. Rouletting is an easier process, and it is found on many of the early stamps. Roulettes can be applied with a homemade device as simple as a modified pizza knife. many business firms around the world applied simple roulettes to the stamps that they bought, facilitating easy separation. At least one postmaster from the town of Tokay (now in Hungary, formerly Austria) applied a roulette, on demand, to the imperforate stamps that he sold in the 1850s. This private roulette is highly sought after today and can sell, when cancelled on an envelope, for as much as $20,000.
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About the same time, in the lat 1840s and early 1850s, several men were experimenting with perforating machines that would cut tiny holes in the paper. The first patent for a perforating machine was filed in England in 1848, and some experimental perforated stamps were issued in 1850 or 1851. The United States began perforating in 1857. The essential problem in developing perforating machines was in perfecting the feed so that the cut holes were made to frame the stamps. Collectors who cherish early stamps know well that though these early machines perforated the stamps, frequently the perforation cut into the design of the stamp severely. Collectors grade a perforated stamp based on its centering, with the ideal stamp being perfectly framed within its perforations. Centering is critical to determining quality, a subject we will discuss at length later.