INTRODUCTION

This project started many years ago in a kitchen sink. The sink has changed, but the activity endures. Stamps have been a source of fascination and enjoyment for many children and adults alike, including the elite and powerful, presidents and kings. These tokens of payment for the service of communication between people have evolved over the last 150 years from drab bits of paper into sometimes large and gaudy message boards for anniversaries, propaganda or celebrations. While 50 years ago heads of state were the norm and only a handful of scientific events or personages appeared on postage stamps, more recently the topic science has become a collectible commodity along with dogs, birds, space exploration, dinosaurs and Disney characters. The image of Einstein has become commonplace, and in an effort to corner valuable revenue some developing countries have launched series of stamps celebrating recent Nobel laureates (none of them their own), taking a lead from the excellent Swedish Nobel stamp program. As more countries are commemorating their famous sons and daughters, it becomes possible to fit together pieces of the great mosaic of the history of science, still with many gaps, to be sure. Some of the most satisfying stamps are not the ones displaying portraits, but those presenting ideas and experiments. such as the photoelectric effect, cloud chamber photographs, or the solar absorption spectrum.

The stamps presented here are from my personal collection and as such are an incomplete reflection of the range of published science-related postal materials. The large and fruitful area of space exploration deserves a separate exhibit, as does the diverse, fascinating field of technology. About half of the stamps on view here were shown in 1991 in the Science and Engineering Library, University at Buffalo, under the title Sci-Phi as an example of non-book related science instruction, and also in a 1992 poster session of the Western New York Library Resource Council, Promoting Scientific Literacy: the Non-Book Approach to Library Exhibits. Most recently, several of these intangible chapters presented here were printed out and shown at a Stamp Exposition during the Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy(Pittcon) in Orlando, Florida in March 1999. The availability of scanning technology and web browsers now makes this material widely accessible to all who have access to the internet. As has been widely pointed out in articles in The Journal of Chemical Education, postage stamps can serve as starting points for engaging student interest in science, or initiating classroom discussion and projects. For others with an interest in science, professionally or not, these miniatures can be sufficient in themselves as objects of enjoyment and wonder, reminders of the marvels of the natural world and its laws.

I am indebted to colleagues in the Science and Engineering Library and to John Naylor for reading this text and providing useful editorial comments. I am particularly grateful to Scott Hollander and Carole Ann Fabian for editing the scanned images and launching this document on the web. Three web sites inspired me with the extraordinary quality of their scanned stamp images:

A Philatelic History of Radiology http://www.xray.hmc.psu.edu/rci/contents_4.html,
Pictures of Famous Physicists http://www.th.physik.uni-frankfurt.de/~jr/portraits.html
Images of Mathematicians on Postage Stamps http://www.geocities.com/mathstamps
The owners of the latter two web sites, Dr Joachim Reinhardt and Jeff Miller, permitted me to refer viewers to highly detailed scans of some stamps as they appear on their pages.--Maiken Naylor

Sci-Philately: A Selective History of Science on Stamps

Last Modified: 3 March 2005 djb
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