Envelope manufacture
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Envelope production, whether by hand or by machine, involves the manufacture of envelopes to carry mail. Of the estimated 450 billion envelopes made worldwide each year at the beginning of the 21st century, virtually all of them were machine-made.
Prior to 1845 and the granting of a British patent to Edwin Hill and Warren De La Rue for the first envelope-making machine, hand-made envelopes were all that were available for commercial use as well as domestic.
However, the "envelopes" produced by the Hill/De La Rue machine were not as we know them today. They were flat diamond (or rhombus)-shaped sheets creased ready for folding to form a rectangular enclosure. Specifically, they did not have the edges of the overlapping flaps treated with a paste or adhesive. The method of securing the envelope or wrapper was a user choice.
Nearly 50 years passed before a commercially successful machine for producing pre-gummed envelopes effectively as we know them today appeared.
The origin of the use of the diamond shape for envelopes is debated. However as an alternative to simply wrapping a sheet of paper around a folded letter or an invitation and sealing the edges it is undeniably a paper-efficient way of producing a rectangular-faced envelope.
The folded diamond-shaped sheet was in use at the beginning of the 19th century as a novelty wrapper for invitations and letters among the segment of the population that had the time to sit and cut them out and were affluent enough not to bother about the waste offcuts that were inevitably generated. However when the British postal reforms of 1840 came along Rowland Hill adopted the fashion for the first prepaid machine-printed pictorial versions which were issued at the same time as the better-celebrated first adhesive postage stamp.
In this way the diamond-shaped wrappers acquired de facto official status and became readily available to the public notwithstanding the time taken to cut them out and the waste generated.
It is surprising that Hill subscribed to this practice. After all, he was the inventor of a rotary printing press for printing newspapers in continuous sheets and clearly knew a thing or two about printing, paper manufacture and the cost of producing print products. The stamp by comparison had the advantage of being a much simpler and less expensive print product to produce. Yet it only came into being as an afterthought.
Hill also installed his brother Edwin as The Controller of Stamps, and it was he with his partner De La Rue who patented the machine for mass-producing the diamond-shaped sheets in 1845.
The most famous paper-making machine was patented by the Frenchman Fourdrinier in 1799. The process involves taking processed pulp stock and converting it to a continuous web which is gathered as a reel. Subsequently the reel is converted to a large number of properly rectangular sheets by guillotining across it reel edge to edge.
The rectangle is a geometric form which occurs infrequently, perhaps never, in nature, but has been long and widely used by mankind in the shaping of materials. By producing machine-made paper as properly rectangular sheets they are intrinsically compatible with printing and duplicating machines - which have always been primarily designed to process flat rectangular sheets, beginning with the Gutenberg press.
Consequently, when mechanically reproducing graphics or text on an envelope the approach best compatible with printing technology is to print on the flat and then cut to shape, crease, gum and fold. In fact when producing a pictorial envelope from a diamond-shaped sheet, or any other geometrically-complex sheet, there is no option but to print before cutting and folding.
However, reproducing an item using a mechanical process always incurs costs relating solely to the machinery itself. These are "absorbed" by making as many or as much of the item as is necessary to reduce the per-unit cost to a level considered acceptable by the customer.
At the end of the 20th century a top of the range envelope-making machine cost in the region of $1 million and could produce 1200 pre-gummed envelopes per minute in boxes of 1000 ready for distribution. With manufacturing costs as high as this very few envelope-making machinery manufacturers appeared in the 19th and 20th centuries, and at the beginning of the 21st century the number satisfying the world demand remained low, with a single enterprise, Winkler and Dunnebier, producing two-thirds of the machines producing the 450 billion envelopes referred to above.
Consequently too the high cost of buying these high capital investment machines has to be factored into the operating costs of any enterprise which engages in producing printed envelopes, and so their line of business is the production of very large runs of the order of 50,000 and upwards. Depending on the size of the run this can entail the use of an entire web or reel.
The result of this is that over the last 150 years or so the most common way of producing printed envelopes commercially has been to overprint on machine-made envelopes. Needless to say, only the largest of companies have a need for 50,000 or more envelopes at any one time.
The drawback is that although printing on the face of an envelope is reasonably straight- forward, an envelope is not a flat sheet of paper and so if printing is required on one or more flaps this incurs higher cost as specialist printing skill is required.
For small businesses with a need for relatively low volumes of printed envelopes there is seldom the justification for this added expense. Furthermore the digital printing revolution which began in the late-20th century saw the introduction of an option for small businesses to overprint on the face of machine-made envelope themselves using their own PC sheet printers in association with suitable software (see Mail Art).
And in 1998 the U.S. Postal Service approved the introduction of a system of applying to an envelope in the printer bin of a PC sheet printer a digital frank or stamp delivered via the Internet. With this innovation a business envelope could be produced in-house addressed, customised with advertising information, and ready to be mailed.
The fortunes of the commercial envelope manufacturing industry and the postal service go hand in hand. And the advent of e-mail in the late 1990s appeared to offer a substantial threat to the postal service.
However the worldwide demand for envelopes continues to rise, and the Universal Postal Union, which is an international cartel of national postal administrations and a specialized agency of the United Nations, is unlikely to disappear overnight. Not least because the postal service is a dependable source of revenue for a government. Among the first five contracts awarded to American companies for the reconstruction of the social and economic infrastructure of Iraq was one of $55 million for a study of the postal system.
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