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Watermarks on Postage Stamps
The most common method used as a safeguard against stamp forgers is the watermark. The invention of the watermark is much older than that of the postage stamp. When paper was hand-made, special metal designs were woven into the wire nets used for taking the pulp out of the vats. In the place where the metal design was, the paper was a little thinner which can be clearly seen if such a sheet is held up against the light.
Watermarks are still used in the production of machine paper. The design of the watermark is affixed in the form of a wire design to the dandy roll. This again causes a thinning of the paper where the wire design is impressed into the pulp. Another method is to impress the watermark into the unfinished paper when it still contains about eighty per cent humidity. The special roll used for this purpose is called an egoutteur.
The majority of watermarks are the result of paper thinning. These are negative watermarks. There exist some watermarks which were produced in exactly the opposite manner. Instead of affixing a metal design to the dandy roll, depressions are made on it and, as a result, the design of the watermark is thicker than the remaining surface of the paper. Such positive watermarks were used by Romania.
Swiss stamps of 1862 have a watermark representing a cross in a double oval. This watermark was not impressed during the production of the paper. It was later impressed into the paper with a die. The first stamps of the world, the British Penny Black and Twopenny Blue of 1840, already had a watermark.
Watermarks are of great importance to philatelists. The reason is that, on apparently identical stamps, different watermarks can be found. As time passed, either the types of watermarks were changed or the watermarked paper was fed into the printing press in a different position. That is how the inverted watermarks and watermarks printed sideways came into existence. In the case of the Czechoslovak watermark of linden leaves, used from 1923 to 1927, eight different positions of the watermark can be distinguished.
There are two main groups of watermarks. They can be arranged on a sheet of paper in such a way that one watermark always appears on one stamp. This is known as a single watermark. The other possibility is that the watermark forms a continuous design, repeating itself on the whole sheet. These are called multiple watermarks. An example is the watermarked paper used for the production of British colonial stamps. The stamps were produced by the Crown Agents, and therefore the watermark is a crown with the abbreviation ‘CA’. At first, a single watermark was used and it appeared on every stamp in the sheet. Later, a multiple watermark replaced it.
Various countries have used different symbols in the attempt to prevent the duplication, by illicit means, of the stamps of their nation. Watermarks have proven to be quite successful in the production of postage stamp.
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