"Adhesive stamps...[entail] a serious loss of time when hundreds of letters have to be despatched."
Carl Bushe
Sticking a stamp to a letter is a fairly trivial matter if you only have one letter. But if you have hundreds of letters then the process of licking and sticking each individual stamp becomes very time-consuming.
In the late nineteenth century, Frenchman Carle Bushe first conceived and patented a machine that would print a stamp on an envelope and record the amount of postage payable on a meter. Today the post office supplies users with franking machines, set up with a pre-paid credit limit, which stamps envelopes and registers the cost of the postage used. The credit is then topped up when necessary.
Franking originally dates back to the seventeenth century when Members of Parliament (MPs) regularly sent hundreds of official letters and were given the privilege of free postage. In those days they inscribed their signature on the top of the envelope to circumvent the stamp and to get free postage, but this was open to abuse, and there were reports of some providing their signatures to friends and family and of others writing to their constituents as part of their reelection campaigns.
Bushe designed his machine in 1884 but sadly his invention remained on paper, and no working model of the machine is known to have been built. In his patent application he clearly recognized the time savings of such a machine. It was left to Chicago inventor, Arthur Hill Pitney, to successfully gain his patent for a mailing system in 1902. It consisted of a manual crank, chain action, printing die, counter, and lockout device. He formed a company, which became the American Postage Meter Company in 1912.
