day of the stamp - Austria / II. Republic of Austria 1977 - 6 Shilling

The stamp motif of this special postage stamp shows a portrait of Dr. Ing. Emanuel Hermann. His name is inseparable from the introduction of the postcard. He was born on June 24, 1839 in Klagenfurt as the son of the district captain of this city and died on July 13, 1902. One of his greatest merits was the invention of correspondence card. He published his proposal in this regard in the "Neue Freie Presse" on January 26, 1869. According to this, postcards were to be sent as a kind of postal telegram in the format of ordinary envelopes with a two-cruiser mark. The deciding factor in his idea was the reduced postage of the correspondence card. It was the great international merit of Austria's postal administration to introduce this innovation on October 1, 1869, and to have regulated the provisions in such a way that the Austrian correspondence card was the basis for their rapid introduction in other countries. Already in the first year of its introduction around 2,930,000 correspondence cards were sold in the Austrian crown lands on this side of the Leitha.