The World’s Most Valuable Item.
Words: Gentleman's Journal
Before the invention of the postage stamp, it was the recipient who paid when a letter was delivered, and it was not uncommon for letters to be rejected because the recipient couldn’t (or didn’t want to) pay. The job of returning and destroying unwanted mail fell to the local post office. The idea of having the sender themselves pay in advance for a small square piece of paper with glue on the back, and then for the post office to cancel it as proof that the fee was paid and to stop it being re-used, was ingenious in its simplicity. Thus, the postage stamp, one of Britain’s Greatest inventions came into existence.
Once the Postage Act was passed by Parliament in 1839 approving the concept of a universal prepaid penny postage system, the Exchequer arranged a competition to design a ‘one penny’ and a ‘two penny’ stamp but none of the entries were considered suitable. So they turned to a design based on a sculpture by William Wyon of Queen Victoria as a 15 year old. The job of printing was awarded to a company called Perkins, Bacon and Petch who were printing 1 pound notes at the time for English banks. The resulting Penny Black in 1840 was the world’s first postage stamp. Despite having a reputation of being rare, there were 68,808,000 printed of which an estimated 32,000,000 still exist.
The invention of the Penny Black gave the world its first postage stamp. Although Queen Victoria was already 20 years old by the time the Penny Black was first printed, her image as a 15 year old remained the same on every postage stamp for her entire reign of 63 years, so she never aged. Today, the Penny Black can be worth anything from £15 to £1,800 or above depending on the condition the stamp is in (the mint version obviously fetching the higher end of the price range). The Two Pence Blue is much more rare than the Penny Black and therefore much more expensive. The highest amount paid for a Two Penny Blue stamp is £1 million at auction in London, a record for the UK for a stamp.
Continental Europe’s first stamps were produced by Switzerland 3 years after the Penny Black, and in the same year Brazil became the first country of the Americas to print their own. The idea soon caught on with other nations but with one curious difference between them all. No country other than Great Britain was allowed to print stamps without the country’s name as part of the design. There was a suggestion by the General Postmaster Tony Benn in 1965 to replace the royal image with either Great Britain or ‘ UK ‘ but the Queen disapproved. Following the example set by Queen Victoria, the image of Queen Elizabeth II on every stamp in use today has remained the same since 1967, created by another sculptor called Arnold Machin when the Queen was in her early 30s, and the refusal of the Queen to approve any changes on three separate occasions – in 1981, 1985 and 1990 – makes it very likely that this profile of the monarch will last until the next succession.
Although there are many reasons why people enjoy studying stamps, the two most popular are learning the postal history attached to a letter’s journey, and the discovery of a unique item. And a nice example of the latter is finding a one-off variety like the ‘3 Skilling Treskilling Yellow’ from Sweden. This stamp was printed in yellow by mistake (it should have been green) and was retrieved from a dustbin and sold for 7 kroner in the 1880s. This stamp has changed hands many times since and the exact price paid by its latest owner has been kept secret but it was estimated to be over GBP 1.6 million. Weighing in at just 0.03 grams it is thought to be the world’s most valuable thing in existence by weight and volume. The owner is believed to be Armand Rousso, also known as Marc Rousso, who is a businessman who was born in France. He is the founder of Accoona.com, a business-to-business search engine, and X3D Techonology.
The Treskilling Yellow is thought to be the world’s most valuable item by weight.
Not all stamps bring good fortune. The 1856 British Guiana 1 Cent Magenta is even better known despite being locked away in a bank vault since 1980 when it was bought for nearly US$ 1 million by a chemicals fortune heir called John du Pont. He is currently serving a 13 – 30 year sentence for 3rd degree murder.
This stamp was bought for over $1 million and is owned by a convicted murderer.
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