In this episode, what does the first pre-paid stamp have to do with contract shipping? Let’s connect the dots.
We start our journey in the historical maritime town of Newburyport, MA, center of shipbuilding and trade in the 19th century and home to a number of exceptional folk.
One of these lights of Newburyport was Jacob Perkins. He was one of those classic overachievers, being employed to make currency dies in his early 20’s, inventing a nail making machine shortly thereafter, and managing over his life to secure numerous US and British patents, invent the refrigerator, set up advanced and secure engraving for such things as official currency, and create high-powered, high-pressure steam devices. And a lot more.
So, as with many people seeking to make their names (and fortunes) at that time, he went to England. There, he parlayed his ability to print forgery-resistant currency, which he had made for banks in the US, into a collaboration with a British printer to print money for banks in England.
Another application of his forgery-proof printing was postage. At this time, the postal system in Britain was a wreck, inefficient, and costly, the postage being based on number of pages and paid for by the recipient. Postal reformer – well, reformer on many issues – Rowland Hill had been advocating for the introduction of a system of pre-paid postage, in order to make the postal system more efficient, remove it from the (profit-making) hands of the aristocracy, and eliminate the horrendous overhead and mismanagement. After considerable political wrangling (the aristocrats losing money on the proposition weren’t enthusiastic about the idea), reform went through and Perkins’ company printed the first pre-glued, forgery-proof, pre-paid postage stamps for the British Government.
In an early example of making Big Data work for you, Hill used his research and that of another OG (Original Geek, that is), Charles Babbage, to show that most of the cost of the system went into the process of handling mail at both ends of the delivery, and that having pre-paid postage at the origination would save oodles of time and money. Despite the typical politi-speak of officials everywhere (government ministers called it a scheme wholly unsupported by facts, a 19th century example of “fake news”), once the bankers and mercantile elites weighed in in favor of the plan, the writing was on the wall. Or on the letter, soon to be sent with one of Perkins’ new stamps.
As I mentioned, Charles Babbage was one of those “just one more thing” types, having his hands in mathematics and statistics, mechanical engineering, natural philosophy, economic theory, and the writing of many publications (to mention just a handful of his pursuits). Babbage also made time to design (but never quite build) the first mechanical computer, conduct a serious campaign against street musicians (you were warned not to get him started on organ grinders…), and hob-nob with the big names in science, industry, business, and politics of the day.
One of those was the equally intemperate Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who Babbage dorked on on railway engineering, including showing the broad gauge superior to the standard gauge, though in the end we know how that argument turned out.
One of Brunel’s other passions (besides railways, and bridges, and tunnels, and, well, you get the picture) was shipping. And being an Eminent Victorian, Brunel thought big. As in really big. As in the Great Eastern, the largest ship ever built to date, and designed to do the UK to Australia run in one go, no stops for fuel required.
In case you hadn’t noticed, the Victorians had no concept of overkill.
But despite Brunel’s ahead-of-his-time massive steamships, it was the mid-size steamers that came to rule the waves of the shipping routes for the next century. Carrying all manner of goods on the coastal and trans-oceanic trade routes, these vessels tended not to have fixed ports of call or schedules, instead going where the cargo took them. This trade was called the tramp trade, after the itinerant travelers moving from place to place in Britain, and the ships themselves tramp steamers. The trade continues to this day due to the vessels’ flexibility to respond to market needs, and to service ports not capable of handling larger bulk cargo carriers.
And to tie this all back to where we began, the merchants of Newburyport, with their fine locally-built clipper ships, were finally overtaken by the steamship, eventually ending the clipper building trade, and the use of the ships as major trading vessels.