Produced by Barbara Kosker, Adrian Mastronardi, The Philatelic Digital Library Project at http://www.tpdlp.net and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) THE ADHESIVE POSTAGE STAMP. DECISION OF THE "ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA": _James Chalmers was the Inventor of the Adhesive Stamp--"Mr. Pearson Hill has not weakened the Evidence" to that effect._ ALSO Papers on the Penny Postage Reform, BEQUEATHED BY THE LATE SIR HENRY COLE. JAMES CHALMERS FIRST PROPOSED THE ADOPTION OF THE ADHESIVE POSTAGE STAMP, OF WHICH HE WAS THE INVENTOR. BY PATRICK CHALMERS, _Fellow of the Royal Historical Society_. [Illustration] LONDON: EFFINGHAM WILSON, ROYAL EXCHANGE. 1886. _Price Sixpence._ PREFACE. When a man of note dies, the journalist of the day can only reproduce in an obituary notice the accepted position of his life and works--it is no part of that writer's duty to examine, so as fully to certify, all the statements at hand, or to ransack old volumes dealing with the times when such reputation was established. That is the duty and the task of the later historian, or of some one specially interested. Such has been my duty, my task, as respects that public benefactor, the late Sir Rowland Hill, with the result arrived at in this and former publications. Upon the death of Sir Rowland Hill in August, 1879, a series of letters with comments thereon appeared in the Dundee press, recalling the name and services of a townsman who, in his day, had taken an active interest in post-office improvement, and had worked in that field to some purpose. Mr. James Chalmers, bookseller, Dundee, who died in 1853, had been an earnest postal reformer. Through his efforts, and after a long correspondence with the Post Office in London, he brought about such an acceleration of the mail as to lessen the time necessary for the reply to a letter from Dundee to London, or betwixt the chief commercial towns of the north and south, by two days--a day each way. Subsequently he conceived the idea of an adhesive stamp for postage purposes; and it was this invention, made known to such post-office reformers as Mr. Hume and Mr. Wallace--with both of whom, as with others, he was in communication--that formed the origin of the adoption of the adhesive stamp in the reformed Penny Postage system of 1840, the plan proposed by Mr. Rowland Hill in 1837 having been that of the impressed stamp.