Innovations are
largely incremental. When phones first became portable, they were simply portable phones. It took Steve Jobs (and better technology) to add cameras and computers to phones, so that most of us could walk around with more computing power in our pockets than existed worldwide thirty years ago. The fact that they are also phones is now incidental to their real utility.
Stamps were like that too. Rowland Hill’s wonderful idea was to create essentially a new form of money for the prepayment of postage – money that could be stuck onto an envelope and then devalued (cancelled) when it was used. His first designs for the stamps looked a bit like stock certificates (the so called Treasury Competition essays of Great Britain). But the idea for a stamp w
as too novel for cutting edge designs. The design for the first postage stamp that was decided on was a picture of Queen Victoria looking sideward – the same design used for medals and coins. The United States and most other countries followed suit and until about 1900, the vast majority of the world’s stamps looked little different than coins printed on paper. By 1900 stamps were so ubiquitous that designers became freer to assume that people knew they were prepaid labels so that stamps could have more interesting designs.
For many collectors, there period 1900-1950 is the most interesting era of stamp issues. Designs were experimental-some were beautiful, some quite silly- but with stamp design freed fr
om its coin based origins, these early twentieth century designs broke from the money based tradition, and set the stage for the very artistic creations that we have today.