Machine postmark
industrial standardised mail marking
A machine postmark or machine cancellation is a postmark or cancellation on mail that is applied by a mechanical device rather than with the use of a handstamp. Nearly all machine-cancellation devices apply both postmark and cancellation simultaneously. While some mail is cancelled using handstamps, machine cancellation is ubiquitous, and in the industrialized nations the vast majority of mail is cancelled by machine.
United States
In the United States, the first successful postmarking machine was developed by Thomas Leavitt in the 1870s, with covers known from 1876. By 1880 Leavitt machines were in use in twenty cities. Cancellations were of a variety of forms, including horizontal and diagonal lines, as well as "football" shapes. The American Postal Machines Company soon got into the business, with postmarks appearing from 1884, and became successful with a machine known for its speed of processing.
APMC introduced the flag cancel in 1894, which used the wavy lines of the cancel to depict an approximate image of an American flag. During the 1890s dozens of other companies got into the business, although most were short-lived, and only about six, including Pitney-Bowes, lasted past the 1920s.
Slogan cancels also first appeared in the 1890s, initially to advertise the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, gradually expanding to include a wide variety of uses.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 7, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6723729. The first chronological checks are 1876, 1880, 1884 and 1894.
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This entry incorporates text from “Machine postmark” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.