A Matter of Adhesion ??

We do a lot of things via email these days, but the lowly letter still has its place in the way that we function as a society.

Which is why you may still find yourself licking envelopes and stamps every once in a while. While self-adhesive forms of these objects exist and are common these days, the lickable forms of those devices that helped to take the concept of mailing objects into the mainstream.

The idea was first posed by a man named Rowland Hill, who suggested the idea of adhesive stamps in his 1837 book Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability. Hill’s document is seen as key to the improvement of the British mail system—and it suggested the idea of offering stamps that could be adhered by wetting, which allowed for a pre-payment of postage by the letter-sender.

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This style ultimately emerged in a mainstream way in the form of the Penny Black, an illustration of Queen Victoria that took the British postal system by storm—and inspired many of the stamps that came afterward. It had its intended effect—it turned mail into a mainstream medium for even the average person.

Lickable envelopes, using similar adhesive properties, came next—often using materials like dextrin and gum arabic to create the sickly-sweet sticking element.

This unusual affair has led to a lot of myths about stamp and envelope use—including whether stamps have gluten (no), are vegan (yes), and they can take your DNA along for the journey (yes!).

Now, to be clear, licking envelopes is not really so necessary these days. We have better options at a consumer level. But for mass-mailers, remoistenable seals have maintained much of their appeal in the manufacturing process, which is why even if you don’t always lick your envelopes, a machine might “lick” some large company’s.

(By the way, in case you’re wondering: Stamps are low-calorie, ranging between 5.9 to 14.5 calories per lick. I don’t recommend the stamp diet, but if you do choose to embrace it, you could probably lick a lot of stamps before having it show up on your figure.)

? Wanna learn more??Check out our 2017 piece on?adhesive envelopes and stamps. Knock yourselves out.