To
counter this trend, Sir Rowland Hill, the British Postmaster General, created
the first adhesive postage stamp in 1840 -- and the modern postal era was born.
The stamps were to be bought beforehand by the person wishing to send a letter,
then affixed to the letter, indicating that the postage had been paid. The
stamps were designed by Hill himself, and bore a profile likeness of the Queen
Victoria, who had just come to the throne three years before. Because they were
printed in black, the one-cent stamps became known as "Penny Blacks" -- and were
the first government printed postage stamp.
This new postal system of collecting the postage in advance proved immensely popular, and it was not long before all the civilized countries in the world had instituted like systems. The United States itself issued its first stamps in 1847, a 5 cent Franklin and a 10 cent Washington.
As more and more nations joined the postal fraternity, the frontiers between them began to cause numerous difficulties. Different nations had different postal rates, transportation fees, and internal conditions, so the delivery of mail over international boundaries involved the negotiation of complicated and confusing bilateral treaties. Mail from Spain to Germany, for example, had to travel from Spain to France under one traty, and from France to Germany under another -- and might be stopped altogether if the treaty expired while the mail was en route. An obvious need existed for a broad international postal system to replace the multitude of bilateral treaties.
One of the early leaders in the movement for an international postal organization was Montgomery Blair, the U.S Postmaster Generaal. It was mostly through Blair's efforts that the first international postal conference was convened in Paris in 1863, attended by the United States and 15 European Nations. Though an international postal organization was not founded in Paris, many of the proposals forwarded at the conference, such as standardization of postal weights and rates, influenced the agreement which finally emerged 12 years later.
In the following years, the initiative in the international movement was taken over by the German Postmaster General, Dr. Heinrich von Stephan, who worked hard to draft proposals which would make the flow of mail between countries as simple and effecient as the flow of mail within countries. His years of labor bore fruit in October, 1874, when 22 countries met in the first Postal Congress in Berne, Switzerland, and founded the Universal Postal Union (U.P.U). The final agreement, which took place in July, 1875, included such principles as a unified rate for letters, the principle that the postage is paid by the sender, standardized delivery and tansportation fees, etc.
Today, all civilized nations of the world belong to the U.P.U. In addition to expediting the world-wide distribution of mail, the U.P.U also regulates international organizations, the U.P.U is the one body which comes closest to successfully fulfilling its original goals.