The stamp then being difficult to counterfeit, and worth but little in itself, while the machinery employed to produce it was costly, the reason is obvious why, so far as is known, only two attempts, and those so clumsy that one wonders who could have wasted time in forging the things, were made to imitate the finely executed, earliest “Queen's head.”[167]
The design was engraved by hand on a single steel matrix, the head, through the agency of this costly machinery, being encompassed by many fine, delicately-wrought lines. The matrix was then hardened, and used to produce impressions on a soft steel roller of sufficient circumference to receive twelve repetitions, the beautiful work of the original matrix being therefore repeated, line for line, in every stamp printed. The roller, being in turn hardened, reproduced, under very heavy pressure, its counterpart on a steel plate a score of times, thus making up the requisite 240 impressions which cause each sheet to be of the value of one sovereign.[168]
Absolute uniformity was thus secured at comparatively little cost. The ingenious process was invented by Mr Perkins,[169] of the firm of Perkins, Bacon & Co. of Fleet Street, who, during the first forty years of the reformed postal system, printed some 95/100ths of our postage stamps, and in that space of time issued nearly 21,000,000,000 of penny adhesives alone.[170] Later, the contract passed into the hands of Messrs De La Rue, who hitherto, but long after 1840, had merely printed stamps of a few higher values than the penny and twopenny issue. In at least one work of fiction, however, the impression is conveyed that the latter firm from the first enjoyed the monopoly of stamp production of all values.
About midway in the 'fifties a serious fire broke out on Messrs Perkins & Co.'s premises, and much valuable material was destroyed. Investigation of the salvage showed that barely two days' supply of stamps remained in stock; and some anxiety was felt lest these should become exhausted before fresh ones could be produced, as even a temporary return to prepayment by coin of the realm would by this time have been found irksome. But with characteristic zeal, the firm at once recommenced work, and only a few people were ever aware how perilously near to deadlock the modern postal machine had come. It was after this fire that the crimson hue of the penny adhesive was altered to a sort of brick-red. The change of colour—one of several such changes exhibited by the red stamp—is duly recorded in Messrs Stanley Gibbon & Co.'s catalogue, though the probably long-forgotten accident with which it would seem to be connected is not mentioned.