[The following account of the first New York Stamp Exhibition was written by Fred J Melville and originally published in The Postage Stamp, 1913.]

Today has proved a great day for American philately. The International Philatelic Exhibition opening in New York informally this morning is America’s maiden effort in exhibitions of this class, but it is a great effort and from a philatelic and a general standpoint it must be reckoned a great success. In general arrangements the show has European exhibitions “skinned to a frizzle” to use an American phrase. But of this, and of the exhibits more anon. For the present I am concerned with the ceremonies, the “exercises” as they are called here, with which the exhibition formally opened to-night; about six hours after the informal opening.

The Engineering Societies’ Building on West 39th Street is a magnificent edifice the storeys of which I have not stopped to count. Suffice it for my purpose to say that five storeys are wholly or partly devoted to the stamp exhibition, and the opening “exericises” were indulged in in the very fine “auditorium” on floors 3 and 4.

The fine edifice known as the Engineering Societies’ Building where the Stamp Exhibition was held October 27th to November 1st, 1913.

Mr. Morgenthau Opens the Proceedings.
After an opening performance by the orchestra, Mr.  J. C. Morgenthau (“Julius Caesar Morgenthau” as he will henceforth be known), the Hon. President of the Board of Directors of the Association for Stamp Exhibitions Incorporated, made a short speech of introduction and welcome. He said :-

“It gives me a very great deal of pleasure and satisfaction on behalf of our Association to bid you welcome to the formal opening of the first International Philatelic Exhibition held in this country. It is just about two years ago that stamp circles in Nassau Street – and in regard to stamps Nassau Street is equivalent to Wall Street in stocks and shares – were agitatated by rumours that there was going to be a great exhibition in New York. A good many of us smiled and shrugged our shoulders. But the rumours soon took shape in the formation of a small committee of the New York Stamp Society and the Collectors’ Club. Later we changed our plan and inaugurated the Association for Stamp Exhibitions, and we were encouraged by the support of America’s great stamp triumvirate, Worthington, Pack and Ackerman. This exhibition is the result of the work of the Association, it is a maiden effort, we have done our best, angels could do no more.”

Mr. Morgenthau then resigned the charge of the meeting to Mr. George H. Worthington, Hon. President. of the Exhibition, and America’s greatest stamp collector. I was especially interested in Mr. Worthington’s short address for it gave us an insight into the attitude of the shrewd business magnate in regard to our hobby.

America’s Foremost Collector on Philately.
Mr. Worthington, who was received with loud applause, said :-

“It is my privilege, as well as my duty prescribed by the committee on arrangements, to extend to you most cordial welcome upon this notable occasion of our coming together from many lands to promote the international interests of philately. This I do in behalf of our organization and in behalf of the philatelists of this great metropolis, whose boundless hospitality I am sure will be fully vindicated and gratefully appreciated by all of us during the progress of this exhibition.

“It is particularly gratifying to note the presence of such a large and representative attendance of our brethren from abroad and from many States, and I must place special emphasis upon the cordiality of our welcome to the sisterhood of philatelists in evidence here by the appearance of so many ladies. In philately, as in all other worthy objects that appeal to the intellectual interests and the sympathies of men, they are essential to progress and to the refinement of our personal relations, they grace this exhibition by the sunlight of their presence.

“I am not here to deliver a homily upon the nature and the objects of philately, except to declare that it is both a science and an art. Those who do not understand it often marvel at its hold upon the interest of those who do; but those who do understand it are alone qualified to estimate its beneficial influence upon the operations of the human mind, upon the pursuit of education and the diffusion of knowledge.

“Philately is at the threshold of the open door leading to historical research. It summons the past from the early decades of governments that have passed away and others that have survived; and it connects this past with the present, link by link. It cultivates the finer sensibilities of perception and of differentiation, and in a degree, perhaps not peculiar to any other science, its interest expands with every event of human history. The story of civilization is told in stamps.

“We have ample reason, therefore, to congratulate ourselves upon our identification with this elevating and useful science. We meet under auspicious circumstances, and, expressing the earnest thanks of philatelists throughout the world for your presence here in its promotion, I bid you each and all most cordial welcome.”

A Distinguished New Yorker.
The Hon. Thomas W. Churchill, President of the Board of Education, City of New York, then gave an address of welcome on behalf of the city. He said :-

“The other day, after I had made an absolute promise to myself, which I never keep, that I would not go out in the evenings for a long time to come, not because the weather was inclement, but in order to gain the acquaintanceship of my family – I have a collection – I received a telephone message from Julius Caesar Morgenthau, and recognizing that in the course of twenty odd years, all of them odd, even the even years, this was my old instructor, I realized I could not refuse him to go anywhere. I read this word ‘philately’ and found that done into English it ‘meant stamps.'”‘ I told him I knew nothing about them, and he said. ‘Whatever you do don’t speak about stamps – stamps are caviare to the general and you are the general.’ I replied if I were not to talk about stamps I must talk about him. Mr. Churchill proceeded to eulogise philately, and described its devotees as members of a great secret society to be in which required the cultivation of some ‘divine touch.’ He considered he had been asked to attend because the Board of Education over which he had the honour to preside had been dubbed ‘Rubber Stamps.’ He thought, for a long while that he was ‘cancelled’ but he was still unobliterated, and though I am not that ‘Baltimore’ nor that Mauritius thing that is not properly spelt (sic) I am very well content to be a fly in that rich amber that he (Mr. Morgenthau) has mellowed all these years of our separation.

“Discussing stamps as labels he said, his lable was ‘rubber,’ he did not know whether Ex-Mayor Sulzers was ‘special delivery’ or ‘internal revenue. Richard the Third he considered the greatest collector of heads, and Chaucer of tales. The only instance he ever knew of a stamp collector who was unhappy was George III.”

How U.S. Stamps are Printed.
The outstanding feature of the exercises was an important and interesting address from Mr. Joseph E. Ralph, the Director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing at Washington, of which the following is a full report. Mr. Ralph, in addition to outlining the methods of production of the postage stamps of the United States gives some very remarkable statistics of the postage stamp output of his department. The. Hon. Joseph E. Ralph said :-

The Hon. Joseph E. Ralph, whose address on the manufacture of U.S. stamps was the feature of the opening “exercises.”

“Mr. President, Delegates to the International Philatelic Exhibition, Ladies and Gentlemen: It affords me much pleasure to meet with you tonight and to make the acquaintance of my best customers. While the Bureau, which I have the honour to direct, prints all of the securities of the United States Government, which embraces checks drafts, bonds, paper money, revenue, customs, parcel post and postage stamps and certificates of deposit for the Post Office Department, and knowing the object which brings you here, I will only discuss that which is of greatest interest to you, the methods of printing our postage stamps.

I fear that I have not suficient time to touch upon the technique of the manufacture of postage stamps as fully as I would like to, but if in my remarks I have omitted to touch upon those essential features which interest you most, I shall be very glad to answer any questions you might ask concerning our stamps at the close of my remarks.

It has been our constant endeavour not only to safeguard our stamps and circumvent their counterfeiting, but to make them really artistic. When you comprehend the small space allowed for artistic embellishment, you necessarily must marvel at the results we obtain. The difficulty encountered in designing a stamp I shall touch upon later on, but let me say that we should be pleased to receive suggestions from you men who devote so much time and so much expense adding to your collections, and to whose energy we no doubt are very much indebted for what we have to be proud of in our American stamps.

44 Million Stamps a Day.
In our great factory each day forty-four million postage stamps are manufactured, counted and put up in packages ready for shipment to the 62,000 post offices throughout the United States. This daily output would cover approximately eight acres of land if laid out flat, or make a chain of stamps 703 miles long when laid end to end.

I do not believe one could go far wrong in asserting that. the prosperity of a country and the standard of the intelligence of its citizens may be gauged by the consumption of its postage stamps. As an illustration of this statement, an idea of the business growth of the United States may be gleaned from the fact that the Bureau of Engraving and Printing delivered 10,937,926,987 perfect postage stamps during the fiscal year 1913, representing a face value of $185,504,556.20.

The engraving division is the corner-stone of the Bureau and the bulwark of our securities. In this division every form of security I have mentioned above have their origin, and the most artistic and skilled engravers that the world produces are employed here.

The Art of Steel-engraving.
Steel-engraving is the perfection of art as applied to securities; it differs from painting and sculpturing, much as the engraver who carves his work on steel plates must deliberately study the effect of each infinitesimal line. Free-hand, with a diamondpointed tool known as a graver, aided by a powerful magnifying glass, he carves away, conscious that one false cut or slip of his tool or miscalculation of depth or width of line will destroy the artistic merit of his creation, and weeks or months of labour will have been in vain. In no other form of printing can the beautiful, soft and yet strong effects in black and white be obtained as in steel-engraving. The introduction of cheap mechanical process work has superseded the beautiful creations of our master engraver commercially, and now we find the art limited to the engraving of securities as applied in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

The work in this division is classified and divided so that the engravers become specially skilled in some particular branch of the art. For instance, they are classified as portrait, script, square letter and ornamental engravers. Each is confined to his own speciality, and thus becomes unusually expert, the result being that not only better work is secured, but a greater amount is turned out in a given time, and, what is of greater importance, increased security is obtained. The individual excellencies and characteristics of a number of men are impressed upon every stamp issued. Therefore, it would be as difficult for one engraver to make a perfect reproduction of a Government plate as it would be for the reader to reproduce an absolute facsimile of his or her own signature, and, strange as it may seem, no one has yet accomplished this feat.

To the credit of the engravers and employes of this division, it shonld be stated that in the history of the Bureau none of its employes has ever engaged in counterfeiting.

Preparing a Stamp Design.
When it is determined to issue a new stamp, the matter is discussed by the officials having charge of the several branches of the service involved, and the conclusions reached are embodied in a model made by a trained designer, which is submitted for the criticisms of the officers who discussed the matter in the first place. The model is then modified in accordance with their criticisms, and is finally approved by the Postmaster-General.

The approved design is placed in the hands if the engravers, who cut it upon a small piece if annealed steel. After the approval of a proof of this engraving, it is heated red-hot in cyanide of potassium and hardened by suddenly dipping it into oil and water. This single engraved subject is duplicated 450 times upon the large plates that the stamps are printed from by means of the transfer process.

Constructing a Stamp Plate.
This is a method of reproducing engraving devised many years ago by Jacob Perkins, an inventive American, who may be considered the father of the present method of duplicating banknotes and stamp plates. It consists of making a reversed duplicate or mould of the original ingraving by rolling a soft, annealed steel roll upon it in the transfer press. Being accurately guided and held by the mechanism of this press, continued rolling under high pressure forces the soft steel of the roll into the engraved lines of the original design, and forms an exact counterpart, in relief, of it. This roll, being hardened, is used to duplicate the engraving, by the same process, upon a soft steel plate, which it will do a great number of times before wearing out, reserving the original engraving, or die as it is called for makins additional rolls. The original engraving is never printed from except to make what is known as die-proofs.

Whence the Stamp Paper comes.
The paper required for the manufacture of the postage stamps for the fiscal year just ended amounted to 48,000 pounds, and to make this paper 1,500 spruce trees were grounded to a pulp. These trees are cut on the mountains of western North Carolina, and covered an area of six acres. Had the trees been converted into lumber, over fifty well-appointed bungalows could have been built, and the paper itself would make edition of over 1,500,000 twenty-page seven column newspaper.

About 500 men are engaged in the pulp mills in which the pulp is made in North Carolina, and the same number is employed in the paper mills at Hamilton, Ohio, in which the finished paper is produced. Six hundred men and women  employment in the Bureau in the manufacture of the stamps, so you will see that a small army is daily engaged in getting them ready for the consumer.

Causes and Effects of Variation In Paper.
You delight in and require your specimens to qually perforated margins of blank paper – so you term it, to be perfectly centred – and wonder why all of our stamps are not so perfect. If you could follow the spruce log from the time it is cut from the mountain side to final appearance in the finished product, you marvel that we get the results as good as we do.

The paper being printed wet contracts on drying, and the mathematically correct layout of engraved plate bears only an approximate relation to the dried, printed sheet. The paper print to-day will vary in shrinkage from that print to-morrow. As the physical properties of the tree govern the expansion and contraction of the paper made therefrom, no two sheets exactly the same size. The actual difference in size of the individual stamp is too minute to be readily discernible, but become a serious factor when the row is twenty stamps long as we now print the sheets.

But that is not all. To smooth the paper for operation of gumming, it is subjected to 500 tons pressure in a hydraulic press, and if very dry it stretches but very little, but if the day is damp and humid, it stretches perceptibly. The contraction of the gum itself is a factor, and the atmospheric conditions still another. Our perforating machines have not human intelligence, and they handly perforate the sheets alike until their adjustment is changed. Therefore, the best we can do is to average the adjustment and it is only by chance that all the perforations are exactly central. Of course, you will understand that typographic printing being done on dry paper eliminates
many of these problems, and no great feat is performed in perfectly centering a dry printed stamp.

The amount of ink required for printing the stamps for the last local year was 568,117 pounds.

Printing the Stamps.
The present method of printing stamps is accomplished upon what is known as “four-plate power-presses.” Four plates are used in order that the operations of inking, wiping, polishing and taking the impressions may be done simultaneously. This press requires the services of a printer to polish the plates, one girl to lay the sheet in position, and another girl to take it off after printing.

After each two hundred sheets are printed, they are counted and dried. To secure a flat surface for subsequent operations, they are pressed in a hydraulic press.

They are next gummed by passing beneath a glass roller which is bathed in a solution of dextrine (which forms the gum), and the sheets are then carried by grippers through a drying chamber in which the gum is dried in less than thirty seconds. Just before leaving the gumming machine, the sheets are carried through a device that breaks the gum into innumerable cracks and materially prevents subsequent curling.

The printed and gummed sheet of 400 stamps is now fed through a rotary perforator that perforates the stamps in one direction and cuts the sheet in half. Another perforator of the same construction perforates the stamps crosswise and makes another cut, thereby quartering the original sheet.

After a close and rigid inspection, these sheets are counted and made into, packages for final packing: for shipment to the post offices.

Tapioca Pudding – Good for Men and Stamps.
The gum on the back of the stamps is made by scientifically roasting the highest grade of tapioca starch such as is used for making pudding, and as 450,150 pounds were used last year, all of the inhabitants of New York City would have been given their fill of tapioca pudding for one meal with the material used.

The sheets of 100 stamps each, as sent to the post offices during the fiscal year 1913, piled upon each other, would make a shaft over six miles high, and placed end to end would make a strip over 16,000 miles long; and as there are ten rows of stamps in each sheet, a strip of single stamps would be more than 160,000 miles long, enough to girdle the earth six times, with something over.

Just a few words of a technical nature relative to the inks used in the printing of postage stamps. Before I became Director of the Bureau, colours for making inks for printing stamps and other securities were selected by comparison with a standard for match in hue and colour strength,no attention being paid to their permanency. The natural result was colours that were notorious for fading. At that time little was known of any systematic method of testing for permanency, and when I undertook to secure standards that were permanent, I had to devise methods.

Colour Problems.
The deterioration of colours is caused by the action of both light and atmosphere. Chemical composition will give a clue as to the action of atmosphere, but the action of light is more subtle, and nothing short of an actual test is of value. Of course, it is impracticable to have a test extending over years of time, so some method had to be devised to give results in days.

It has been determined from exhaustive experiments that a colour that will not change after exposure to bright sunlight in the summer for a period of three days can be relied upon to withstand days of exposure in the diffused light of an ordinary room. The amount of actinic light given off by the sun during a cloudless day in summer was measured photographically, and by the same method the amount can be gauged on a cloudy or rainy day. This enabled a standard condition to be measured and governed.

The amount of fading in such a day, even with rather fugitive colours is very slight, so the following method was devised to determine what effect long exposure would have. A strip of gaper printed with an ink made from the colour was exposed to light one, two, and three days, with a part protected by black paper. By comparison of the exposed parts with that protested by black paper, it was found that some of the .colours would fade a little more each day, and others would fade for the first day, and remain stable for the other two days. The former were classed as progressive in fading. and the inference is that they would eventually fade away. The assumption is that the others, would fade slightly and then remain permanent. Further experience has corroborated this view, and to-day no oolours are used in the Bureau that show progressive fadings.

Present Tests for Colour Permancy.
We now make fading tests with an artificial light – the quartz mercury lamp – which is on the same principle as the familiar Cooper-Hewett mercury tube, except it is so high in the ultraviolet, or actinic, rays, that it is enclosed in a special protective casing to prevent those near it from being sunburned, which would be the case if they were exposed to it for a few minutes.

In securing permanent colours, we had to sacrifice some of the brilliancy that is characteristic of nearly all of the analine colours, although there is solidity and softness that is more artistic in our present series.

The only analine colours we use are the reds, and those colours that contain red (purples and browns and oranges). For yellow we use chrome yellow; for blue, Prussian blue and ultramarine, and for black we use bone-black, which is practically carbon. All of these are minerals except Prussian blue, which is partly organic and partly inorganic.

The source of some of these colours may be of interest to you. The analine reds are made from coal-tar; the Prussian blue was originally made from calcined horn, but now from a great variety of substances, and can even be made electrolitically from the nitrogen of the air; the ultra-marine was originally made from lapis-lazuli, but now synthetically by calcining its constituents; the chrome yellow is made articucally and is chemically chromate of lead. The bone black is made from calcined bones, as its name would indicate.

The Duplex Tones of Ink.
The science of colour, which has advanced to a rational stage only in recent years, is too complex to be treated at length here, but there are a few phenomena that may be of interest to you. An ink is not a simple colour and it shows two distinct hues, known as overtone and undertone. These may be simply defined as the colour transmitted from the surface or reflected, and that transmitted through the ink. As appreciable thickness of the ink may be a red of yellowish cast, while an excessive thin layer may exhibit a bluish cast. The former is know as overtone and the latter undertone. When a postage stamp plate is new, the overtone will predominate, while as it wears the undertone becomes apparent. This partly explains what you term as shades, although there are other factors that govern this variation. Although we take precautions to use an ink that exhibits the minimum of difference between overtone and undertone, and discard the plate when it exhibits pronounced wear, this variation is bound to exist.

The yellowing of paper, which is inevitable no matter how expensive the paper may be, changes the colour by introducing just that amount of yellow just as surely as if it were added to the ink formula.

Exposure to acid fumes, no matter how dilute, sooner or later will affect the colour to produce shades and it is not our purpose to make an indestructible ink, for if we did there would be no difficulty in removing the cancellation marks and using a stamp indefinitely. We aim to give you the best that we can make that will meet with all conditions.

Philatelic Holocausts at the Bureau.
You are all aware, no doubt, of the destruction by the Bureau of a large number of the two-cent Panama-Pacific Commemorative stamps as the result of an error in the designation of same. There were 41,064,800 of these stamps, printed, having a value of $821,296 yet not a single stamp of this series ever left the Bureau. What a prize one of these stamps would have been to the collector?

As the result of a change from the original in the 50-cent parcel post stamps, 570,800 of that series, with a face value of $286,400 were destroyed. Nor did one of these stamps leave the Bureau precincts.

Checking 11,000,000,000 Stamps.
Near the close of the past fiscal year, inspectors of the Post Office Department visited the Bureau all unannounced to check up our accounts, and after many days’ duration, the accounts checked out the last one-cent stamp, and we received the heartiest compliments for the excellent system we have in practice at the Bureau. Over 11 billions (sic) of stamps were accounted for, and I am pleased to state that not a single stamp was misplaced or went astray.

Securities to the value of over three billion (sic) of dollars were manufactured by the Bureau, during the year 1913, and to the credit of our honest employés be it said that all of this vast sum was handled without the loss of a single penny or postage stamp to the Government, and none of its faithful toilers ever engaged in the counterfeiting of our products.

The New Rotary Stamp-Printing Press.
After seven years’ labour, we have perfected a rotary printing press for the printing of postage stamps that will completely revolutionize stamp printing from intaglio plates. The new machine, which is expected to be placed in operation in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing within the next thirty days, is the the result of the labour and efforts of Mr. Benjamin R Stickney, Mechanical Expert and Designer of the Bureau.

This press combines twenty-three operations in one. It prints, gums and perforates the stamps; cuts them into sections of 100 stamps each, or will finish the stamps in coils of 500 and 1,000 stamps per coil.

It turns out the finished product ready for shipment to the postmasters of our country. By its use a saving of 65 percent or $280,000 will be effected each year in the present cost of printing the stamps.

I have not the time to describe the technique of this machine, and we invite those who are interested to visit the Bureau after November 15th, when the machine will be in operation.

The Bureau has on exhibition photographs showing the process of making postage stamps. This exhibit contains two photographs showing the front and rear views of this interesting rotary printing press. Our exhibit also contains a specimen of the first work printed by this machine.

Mr. Stickney, the inventor of this machine, is present here to-night, and I know he would be pleased to explain the technique of the machine to anyone present who may be interested.

* * * *

After short, speeches from Brigadier-General Coolidge, President of the American Philatelic Society and Mr. Frederick R. Cornwall, Ex-President of the same National Society, the proceedings terminated.

* * * *

The Judges.
The Judges had their first meeting to-night, and will start their arduous task of adjudicating the 325 exhibits first thing in the morning. The Judges are :-

United States –
A. H. Caspary.
F. R. CornwaIl.
Eugene Klein.
John A. Klemann.
John N. Luff.
B. W. H. Poole.
Walter S. Scott.

Great Britain –
D. Field.
L. L. R. Hausburg.
Fred. J. Melville.

Mr. E. D. Bacon who was to have acted as a Judge was detained in England, and while many regrets have been expressed at his appointment to the custodianship of the King’s collection, in succession of the late Mr. J. A. Tilleard, has been received here with the greatest satisfaction.