The first envelope, which included postage, was issued in England at the same time as the first stamp in 1840. The allegorical design on the envelope depicted a woman who represented Britain, who sent messages to all parts of the world. At the bottom were the words: Postage - 1 penny. Oddly enough, this convenient form of payment for postage did not take root then, and soon the envelopes were withdrawn from sale.
From prying eyes
A shirt of letters … Vladimir Dal gave such a figurative definition to a postal envelope in his “Explanatory Dictionary”. True, at first the letters did without "clothing." The ancient Novgorodians, for example, exchanged birch bark letters rolled out in text through messengers. The address was written on a birch bark label attached to the package. Such a transfer had a significant inconvenience - the letter was poorly protected from prying eyes. That is, in fact, the answer to the question - why did the envelope appear. That is, at first, not even an envelope, but the custom of folding the letter so that the text is inside, and the place for the address is outside.
Wax seals
From that moment on, the sealing wax imported to Europe from China through India becomes the companion of the letter, which was itself an envelope. To get acquainted with the contents of the package, the wax seals on it had to be broken. An ancient Chinese invention has helped Europeans keep their correspondence secret for many years.
Sealing wax was cooked on the basis of resinous substances or wax with the addition of fillers - chalk, gypsum. It was dyed with ultramarine, cinnabar, soot and other mineral paints and sold as sticks polished to a luster. Sometimes, to heighten the chic, they were silver and even gilded. The sealing wax had to endure, without losing its hardness, the highest summer temperature and at the same time easily melt, say, from a candle flame.
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Colored sealing wax could tell the addressee about the content of the message even before he opened the envelope. Red sealing wax was used, as a rule, for business letters. A white seal announced the wedding, a brown one called for a banquet, and a black one for a funeral. In other cases, yellow, green, ruby and gray seals were used.
Do not print out the diplomas
Over time, the law arose to protect correspondence from idle curiosity. For example, in the Petrine Decree on the Siberian Post it was said: "Order no one’s letter to print, so that everyone, having paid, was hopeful." But selfish interests and ordinary curiosity sometimes turned out to be stronger than the royal decrees, so that the sealing wax continued to fulfill its role. But gradually he had a rival - glue. The envelope itself has also changed: it separated from the letter, became its "shirt".
True, sometimes the letter and the envelope were again combined into a single whole. Such were, for example, the triangles of letters from the times of the Great Patriotic War.
Shell - clay and paper
The very word "envelope" comes from the Latin verb meaning "to turn, wrap", and goes back to the days when the letter itself was turned into an envelope. A protective shell for writing, however, was known in Ancient Assyria. A clay tablet, the inscription on which was not intended for prying eyes, was surrounded by a clay shell, on which the name of the addressee was written, and then they burned it. It was possible to read the message only by breaking the "envelope".
Paper envelopes appeared only in the 17th century, and their mass production for postal purposes began in 1820 at the initiative of the English bookseller Brewer. He exhibited in the window of his stationery shop, small, elegant letter cards, which quickly gained popularity among the fair sex. However, the address on them barely fit. In general, envelopes were needed. And Brewer first came up with the idea of making them specifically for sale, and 24 years later Londoners Hill and De la Rue invented the first machine for making what one of the modern dictionaries calls a sealed paper envelope for enclosing letters and keeping them safe.
Colored lining
Soon, envelopes of various sizes appeared - from very small, for business cards, to large, in which today, for example, manuscripts are sent to the editorial office. They began to produce "shirts of letters" of various colors, artistically designed. But, of course, the main attention was paid to ensure that the envelope did not divulge the content of the news. Therefore, they began to be made with a lining of thin colored paper. But it is easier, of course, to pick up opaque paper, or, conversely, to take light, even slightly translucent, but print a colored patterned background on its inner side. As a result, the weight of the letter is small and the text is not visible.
Fedor Yaraja. Magazine "Secrets of the XX century" No. 48 2010