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'''The Penny Black (1840)'''

The first postage stamp world-wide was the Penny Black of Great Britain, in 1840. Even its promoters were surprised by how quickly the public embraced the strange concept of sticking a small rectangle of elaborately printed paper onto their envelopes. The first US stamps were the 5-cent Franklin and ten-cent Washington of 1847. Their success was more modest at first, but they too caught on, and soon the first stamp collectors were born.