The postage stamp is often recorded in storybook history as a great individual achievement of Sir Rowland Hill.

Indeed, no-one can doubt Hill’s importance to the project of postal reform that gave us the adhesive stamp and uniform postal charge.

But, the stamp was a team effort. And it was achieved in the age of machines.

Thanks in large part to the great postage stamp printers of the Victorian era.

They were:

The pioneers: Messrs. Perkins, Bacon & Co

Perkins and Bacon had American roots.

Jacob Perkins is one of the most consequential figures in the history of modern printing, but like many men of his age he was a polymath. Lots of his many patents come from his experiments in steam power and he is known as the “father of the refrigerator” for his work in that area.

Jacob Perkins, who innovated so often its hard to pin him down. He didn't always succeed though, and several businesses failed. 

He was born in Massachusetts and apprenticed to a goldsmith after leaving school aged 12.

When his employer died, Perkins continued to work in metal, and was subsequently employed at the Massachusetts mint.

Already, he was innovating and got his first patent for a nail-making machine.

He soon turned his formidable technical skills to printing money.

Printing in the early 19th century meant engraving plates. Perkins had just the skills for this, and started his first printing business with Gideon Fairman.

Among their jobs was printing money.

Forgery is a major concern of money producers, and Perkins was successful in producing notes that were hard to copy.

The great innovations

It wasn’t all his own work, he at least once bought technology and patented it, but Richard C A Payne of the Royal Philatelic Society London writes:

“We therefore see that in our field there were two main accomplishments of Perkins, he invented what were known as 'stereotyped steel plates' and the process of hardening a steel die without destroying the engraving. He also invented the transfer press and the process of transferring of engraved work from one piece of metal to another piece of metal upon the soft steel of a transfer roll to take up a relief from the hardened steel die, and after hardening the transfer roll, to transfer the engraving to a soft steel plate, thus making duplication impossible.”

To these can be added the “geometric lathe” invented by Asa Spencer.

This machine, which became known as the “rose engine”, allowed the printing of a white line in complex patterns that couldn’t be repeated. (Similar patterns are still used on many modern banknotes, and look something like a spirograph drawing.) 

Intricate patterns like these were impossible to copy.

This, Perkins bought in 1815, along with the rights to the machine. Spencer went on to work for Perkins businesses.

Perkins’ firms made the first steel-engraved printed books in the US and soon moved into bank note printing, producing currency for Boston National Bank, the National Bank and bidding for contracts with the Second National Bank in Philadelphia (the home of the US mint).

This work was noticed in the country from which the US had recently won independence.

Forgery was considered a major problem in Great Britain, and was subject to savage punishment as a result.

British bank notes were too easy to forge.

In an effort to deal with the problem, the Royal Society turned some of the big scientific minds of the age to producing notes. Society president Sir Joseph Banks set a competition, with a £20,000 prize (an enormous figure at the time) for anyone who could print “unforgable” notes. Not quite “anyone” sadly, as Perkins, with Fairman and Spencer, travelled to the UK to try to claim the prize (at the invitation of English engraver Charles Heath) only to be turned down over their foreign birth.

However, they did get work.

The banknote printing was done by a new partnership, Perkins, Fairman and Heath.

Fairman left the partnership in 1820, and Heath was bought out by his son-in-law, Joshua Butters Bacon (who was also an American) and the company became Perkins, Bacon in 1829.

A third party, an engraver called Henry Petch, was made a partner in the firm around this time, but not all partners were involved in all projects and the stamp printing company is usually referred to as Perkins, Bacon though at the time it was Perkins, Bacon & Fetch.

Jacob’s great innovations produced designs that were too complex to be copied.

The background designs were put onto a “soft” steel, which was then hardened into the dye. That image was then impressed onto a transfer roller, that was itself hardened, and used to create a plate of repeated images.

A die of the sort used on the first stamps.

This is a simplified recounting of a process that was necessarily complex and produced hugely complex images.

The first stamp production process 

Perkins, Bacon may have missed out on work, but they were hugely successful in the UK, producing what we now would call security printing for the likes of cheque books and share certificates. 

Their success with the Penny Black contract was, at least in part, because Sir Rowland Hill knew Perkins.

Although the production of billions of stamps was a very complicated affair, bringing together multiple expertises, it was arranged from first conception to production in just five months.

Hill decided that a portrait of the Queen should be used on the stamp, partly because he thought pictures of faces were hard to alter without people spotting the change.

A very fine example of a Penny Black portrait, taken during the production process and for official government use only. 

Perkins, Bacon & Petch produced their background onto a die. A space was cleared in the centre. In that space, Charles Heath (or perhaps his son Frederick) engraved a portrait derived - via a sketch by Henry Corbould - from William Wyon’s engraved profile of Victoria from 1838.

This process had to be done twice after the first effort failed to transfer.

With approval from the Queen and the Chancellor of the Exchequer production went ahead on flat-bed printing presses at Whitefriars Street.

It was an automated process, but required plenty of human work, beyond cranking a propelling wheel.

The plates were put on the bed of a press and warmed from below with a gas flame.

An example of a Perkins Bacon press.

Ink was rolled onto the plate.

Excess ink was cleaned off with a rag.

This process is completed with whiting powder.

A dampened sheet of paper is laid on the plate and the operator turns the wheel to press the paper into the plate.

This could be done 800 times each 24 hours.

And it was, not countless times, but minutely recorded times.

In total, those presses were producing 600,000 stamps-a-day by May 1840.

The first plate was replaced on April 22, and 11 more were used to produce 68 million Penny Blacks.

And the design remained the same when the stamp’s colour changed and the same presses went to churning out billions of Penny Reds.

Historic Victorian GB stamps

We are now the holders of the world’s largest collection of rare stamps.

Many of them beautiful examples that came from Perkins, Bacon’s presses.

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