Rowland Hill
Rowland Hill was an English teacher and postal reformer whose 1837 pamphlet led to the Uniform Penny Post of 1840 and the Penny Black, the first adhesive postage stamp.
What they did and why it matters
Hill introduced flat-rate, prepaid postage, the basic model behind today's postage labels and flat-rate shipping. Before his reform, British postage was charged by distance and usually paid by the recipient. He argued for a uniform low rate by weight, prepaid by the sender with a stamp, and mail volume more than doubled in the first year. His approach of simple, prepaid pricing returns in modern parcel services such as USPS flat-rate boxes and in the prepaid labels that e-commerce shipping software prints for every order.
Related people
Events
Sources
- Rowland Hill (Wikipedia) en.wikipedia.org
- The first ever stamp: the Penny Black (The Postal Museum) postalmuseum.org