Perfection Example

This is an image of the impression made by the Type I Perfection machine. It cancelled this government postal card in 1901, at Salamanca, New York.

As described in the machine cancel pages, this was really a mechanically-assisted hand-stamping device, rather than an automatic machine. The postal employee had to place the mail under the device's head, and pull on a large lever to simultaneously ink the cancelling die, and bring it downward onto the cover to make the impression.

Note the "ghosts" on this card (the card was inverted for ease of viewing the cancel). These appear to be offsets caused by stacking still-wet cancelled mail on top of this card (certainly more than once). It might, of course, be possible to argue that these are artifacts of the machine itself. If anyone else has a better theory, I would be interested in hearing it.

If you wish, you can load the picture separately [8k GIF].

Copyright©1999 Robert Swanson

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