The London Times, one day in 1841, carried an advertisement that read: “A young lady, being desirous of covering her dressing room with cancelled postage stamps, has been so far encouraged in her wish by private friends as to have succeeded in collecting 16,000.” The mania for collecting stamps occurred almost as soon as the first stamps were used for mailing letters, and it was called a mania at the time. The first official name for the hobby was timbromania, derived from timbre, the French word for stamp.

It was not until 1864 that the word philately, the current official term for stamp collecting, was coined. It comes from two Greek words that mean “the love of tax free things.” Prior to the invention of postage stamps, the receiver of mail had to pay a tax for its delivery. When stamps came into use, the sender paid a flat fee, and the letter arrived untaxed at the recipient's door.

The use of stamps for mailing letters was a new application of an old idea. Revenue stamps had long been used to verify the payment of an excise tax. In 1712 the English Parliament passed a stamp act to force payment of a tax on magazines. Everyone familiar with American history is aware of the fury caused in the colonies when Parliament passed the Stamp Act of 1765 as a way of taxing all public documents, including newspapers.

The idea for the postage stamp was originated by an English schoolmaster named Rowland Hill. He had noticed that postal revenues were falling as mail rates increased. Mail was sent free, and delivery was paid for by the recipient. If the recipient refused delivery, there was no income, and the whole process of delivery and return brought nothing to the state. In 1837 Hill published a pamphlet entitled “Post Office Reform,” containing his proposal for prepaid stamps at a flat fee, regardless of distance. He worked out the details with the treasury, and on May 1, 1840, the first stamps went on sale. They were the one penny black and the two pence blue, each carrying a likeness of Queen Victoria.

The first stamps were much like those used today a small paper rectangle with an illustration (the postal stamp) on one side and glue on the reverse side. They, as well as the first Brazilian stamps, differed from today's stamps in that they carried no country name. They were intended only for internal use. The stamps were printed by the firm of Perkins, Bacon and Petch, a company that also printed bank notes.

Brazil, in 1843, was the second country to issue stamps. In the same year two Swiss cantons, Zurich and Geneva, issued their own stamps. In the United States the first stamps were issued in 1842 for local delivery in New York City. By 1845 individual postmasters in various cities were printing their own stamps in various values. The federal government first issued stamps in 1847 in values of five and ten cents.

One of the rarest and most costly of all stamps for collectors was printed in the British colony of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, in 1847. The first French and Belgian stamps were issued in 1849. The next year stamps were printed by Austria Hungary, Prussia, Spain, Switzerland, British Guiana, two Australian colonies, and the three German states of Saxony, Schleswig Holstein, and Hanover. After 1850 stamps came into use around the world.