Walden

22 Nov 2011
02:50:26am

re: Challenge question: What appears to be wrong about this card (and why what appears wrong is correct, but wrong on a whole different level)

Here is my guess:

What appears wrong but is correct: 10 pfennig was the correct rate to the United States

What this was correct: because the sender wrote on the back of the postcard. Although some countries allowed senders to write on the back for domestic usage, the United States did not introduce the "divided back" postcard until 1907.

Is this correct?

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Rhinelander

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22 Nov 2011
10:47:25am

re: Challenge question: What appears to be wrong about this card (and why what appears wrong is correct, but wrong on a whole different level)

Yes. That was really fast. -- It actually took me quite a while to figure out this puzzle initially a few years ago, when I first received the card. I have since seen many more cards with exactly the same postage due assessed.

It was in 1906 when the members of the Universal Postal Union officially adopted the "UPU color scheme" for the most common classes of international mail: Green for printed matter, red for postcards, and blue for letters of the first weight class. Prior to 1906 the color scheme was just a recommendation to the UPU member countries, but many countries followed the recommendation. In the United States, the color change occurred in 1898. The 5¢ brown Grant stamp (Scott# 270) was changed to blue (Scott 281). So, if you ever were wondering about the seemingly endless parade of 1¢ greens, 2¢ reds, 3¢ violets and 5¢ blues -- here is your explanation.

So, in the context of the postcard shown below, the card had a red 10 pfennnig stamp, and without any need of further research into the postal rates of imperial Germany, the red stamp appears to indicate a correct franking of the card. This was, BTW, the whole point of following one universal scheme of stamp colors internationally: aiding in the incoming foreign mail control.

The assessment of postage due, then, becomes a puzzle. Walden and David present the solution. The writing on the back of postcards was not allowed in the U.S. until March 1, 1907. Other countries, including Germany (in 1905), had already loosened this restriction and permitted "divided back" postcards. In the U.S., postcards with writing on the back still had to be mailed at the letter rate. The postage due of 5 cents covered this partial underpayment.

The Germans (or Brits etc.) were in on it. The boxed T marking on the card is of German origin, so the German post office knew that the card was under franked for delivery in the U.S. A blue 20 pfennig letter rate stamp was needed. The "pound of flesh" was collected for the German postal service.

There are two connections that can be made from this. First, in the parallel opera glass thread (linked above), there is mentioning of the first machines used to mark postage due mail appearing in 1902. Well, Great Britain was the first country (to my knowledge) to allow messages to be written on the back of postcards in 1902. We can imagine that the writers' honest mistake about this practice also being acceptable in the U.S. happened all the time. I would think that thousands of incoming postcards every day all had the same "problem." Due to uniform dimensions, postcards are ideal for machine handling so here you go; just run them all through the machine.

Second, the date when "divided back" postcards and messages on the back of postcards were legalized in the U.S. coincides with the date when the application of received markings on the back of postcards was abandoned -- in 1907.

On received markings

As can be seen on the above postcard, the received marking partially obscures the message, which is at least part of the reason why the practice of backstamping postcards ceased at the time.

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