11/16/2017 Envelope - Wikipedia
Envelope
An envelope is a common packaging item, usually made of thin flat material.
It is designed to contain a flat object, such as a letter or card.
Traditional envelopes are made from sheets of paper cut to one of three
shapes: a rhombus, a short-arm cross or a kite. These shapes allow for the
creation of the envelope structure by folding the sheet sides around a central
rectangular area. In this manner, a rectangle-faced enclosure is formed with an
arrangement of four flaps on the reverse side.
Front of an envelope mailed in the
U.S. in 1906, with a postage stamp
and address
Contents
1 Overview
2 Sizes
2.1 International standard sizes
2.2 North American sizes
3 Manufacture
3.1 History of envelopes
3.2 Present and future state of envelopes Back of the above envelope,
showing an additional receiving
4 Types of envelopes office postmark
4.1 Windowed envelopes
4.2 Security envelopes
4.3 Mailers
4.3.1 Padded mailers
5 See also
6 References
7 External links
Overview
When the folding sequence is such that the last flap to be closed is on a short side it is referred to in commercial envelope
manufacture as a pocket - a format frequently employed in the packaging of small quantities of seeds. Although in
principle the flaps can be held in place by securing the topmost flap at a single point (for example with a wax seal),
generally they are pasted or gummed together at the overlaps. They are most commonly used for enclosing and sending
mail (letters) through a prepaid-postage postal system.
Window envelopes have a hole cut in the front side that allows the paper within to be seen.[1] They are generally
arranged so that the receiving address printed on the letter is visible, saving the sender from having to duplicate the
address on the envelope itself. The window is normally covered with a transparent or translucent film to protect the letter
inside, as was first designed by Americus F. Callahan in 1901 and patented the following year.[2] In some cases, shortages
of materials or the need to economize resulted in envelopes that had no film covering the window. One innovative process,
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invented in Europe about 1905, involved using hot oil to saturate the area of
the envelope where the address would appear. The treated area became
sufficiently translucent for the address to be readable. As of 2009 there is no
international standard for window envelopes, but some countries, including
Germany and the United Kingdom, have national standards.[3]
An aerogram is related to a lettersheet, both being designed to have writing on
the inside to minimize the weight. Any handmade envelope is effectively a
lettersheet because prior to the folding stage it offers the opportunity for
writing a message on that area of the sheet that after folding becomes the Patent drawing of Americus
Callahan's windowed envelope
inside of the face of the envelope.
The "envelope" used to launch the Penny Post component of the British postal
reforms of 1840 by Sir Rowland Hill and the invention of the postage stamp, was a
lozenge-shaped lettersheet known as a Mulready.[4] If desired, a separate letter could be
enclosed with postage remaining at one penny provided the combined weight did not
exceed half an ounce (14 grams). This was a legacy of the previous system of calculating
postage, which partly depended on the number of sheets of paper used.
During the U.S. Civil War those in the Confederate States Army occasionally used
envelopes made from wallpaper, due to financial hardship.
A "return envelope" is a pre-addressed, smaller envelope included as the contents of a
larger envelope and can be used for courtesy reply mail, metered reply mail, or freepost
(business reply mail). Some envelopes are designed to be reused as the return envelope,
saving the expense of including a return envelope in the contents of the original
envelope. The direct mail industry makes extensive use of return envelopes as a
A Japanese funeral
response mechanism.
envelope used for offering
condolence money. The
Up until 1840, all envelopes were handmade, each being individually cut to the
white and black cords
appropriate shape out of an individual rectangular sheet. In that year George Wilson in represent death. Similar-
the United Kingdom patented the method of tessellating (tiling) a number of envelope looking envelopes with red
patterns across and down a large sheet, thereby reducing the overall amount of waste and silver cords are used
produced per envelope when they were cut out. In 1845 Edwin Hill and Warren de la for weddings.
Rue obtained a patent for a steam-driven machine that not only cut out the envelope
shapes but creased and folded them as well. (Mechanised gumming had yet to be
devised.) The convenience of the sheets ready cut to shape popularized the use of machine-made envelopes, and the
economic significance of the factories that had produced handmade envelopes gradually diminished.
As envelopes are made of paper, they are intrinsically amenable to embellishment with additional graphics and text over
and above the necessary postal markings. This is a feature that the direct mail industry has long taken advantage ofand
more recently the Mail Art movement. Custom printed envelopes has also become an increasingly popular marketing
method for small business.
Most of the over 400 billion envelopes of all sizes made worldwide are machine-made.
Sizes
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International standard sizes
International standard ISO 269 defines several standard envelope sizes, which are designed for use with ISO 216
standard paper sizes:
Format Dimensions (mm) Dimensions (in) Suitable for content format
DL 110 220 4.33 8.66 13 A4
C7 81 114 3.2 4.5 A7 (or 12 A6)
C7/C6 81 162 3.19 6.4 13 A5
C6 114 162 4.5 6.4 A6 (or 12 A5 or 14 A4)
C6/C5 114 229 4.5 9 13 A4
C5 162 229 6.4 9 A5 (or 12 A4)
C4 229 324 9.0 12.8 A4
C3 324 458 12.8 18 A3
B6 125 176 4.9 6.9 C6
B5 176 250 6.9 9.8 C5
B4 250 353 9.8 13.9 C4
E4 280 400 11 15.75 B4
The German standard DIN 678 defines a similar list of envelope formats.
North American sizes
There are dozens of sizes of envelopes available.
The designations such as "A2" do not correspond to ISO paper sizes. (Often, North American paper jobbers and printers
will insert a hyphen to distinguish from ISO sizes, thus: A-2.)
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Format Dimensions (in) Dimensions (mm) Ratio
A2 438 534 111.1 146.1 132%
A6 434 612 120.7 165.1 137%
A7 514 714 133.4 184.2 138%
A8 512 818 139.7 206.4 148%
A9 534 834 146.1 222.3 152%
A10 6 912 152.4 241.3 158%
No. 634 358 612 92.1 165.1 179%
No. 734 (Monarch) 378 712 98.4 190.5 194%
No. 9 378 878 98.4 225.4 229%
No. 10 418 912 104.8 241.3 230%
No. 11 412 1038 114.3 263.5 231%
No. 12 434 11 120.7 279.4 232%
No. 14 5 1112 127.0 292.1 230%
Envelopes accepted by the U.S. Postal Service to be eligible for mailing at the price for letters must be:
Rectangular with a width-to-height "aspect ratio" between 1.3 and 2.5
At least 312 inches high 5 inches long 0.007 inch thick.
No more than 618 inches high 1112 inches long 14 inch thick.[5]
Manufacture
History of envelopes
The first known envelope was nothing like the paper envelope we know of
today. It can be dated back to around 3500 to 3200 BC in the ancient Middle
East. Hollow, clay spheres were molded around financial tokens and used in
private transactions. The two people who discovered these first envelopes were
Jacques de Morgan, in 1901, and Roland de Mecquenem, in 1907.
Paper envelopes were developed in China, where paper was invented by 2nd
century BC.[6] Paper envelopes, known as chih poh, were used to store gifts of
money. In the Southern Song dynasty, the Chinese imperial court used paper Tablet and its sealed envelope:
employment contract. Girsu, Sumer,
envelopes to distribute monetary gifts to government officials.[7]
circa 2037 BC. Terra cotta. Museum
Prior to 1845, hand-made envelopes were all that were available for use, both of Fine Arts of Lyon.
commercial and domestic. In 1845, Edwin Hill and Warren De La Rue were
granted a British patent for the first envelope-making machine.[8]
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The "envelopes" produced by the Hill/De La Rue machine were not as we know
them today. They were flat diamond, lozenge (or rhombus)-shaped sheets or
"blanks" which had been precut to shape before being fed to the machine for
creasing and made ready for folding to form a rectangular enclosure. The edges
of the overlapping flaps treated with a paste or adhesive and the method of
securing the envelope or wrapper was a user choice. The symmetrical flap
arrangement meant that it could be held together with a single wax seal at the
apex of the topmost flap. (That the flaps of an envelope can be held together by
Red envelopes are an example of
applying a seal at a single point is a classic design feature of an envelope.)
paper envelopes. They are used for
Nearly 50 years passed before a commercially successful machine for monetary gifts.
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 a tidy and ostensibly paper-efficient way of
producing a rectangular-faced envelope. Where the claim to be paper-efficient fails is a consequence of paper
manufacturers normally making paper available in rectangular sheets, because the largest size of envelope that can be
realised by cutting out a diamond or any other shape which yields an envelope with symmetrical flaps is smaller than the
largest that can be made from that sheet simply by folding.
The folded diamond-shaped sheet (or "blank") was in use at the beginning of
the 19th century as a novelty wrapper for invitations and letters among the
proportion of the population that had the time to sit and cut them out and were
affluent enough not to bother about the waste offcuts. Their use first became
widespread in the UK when the British government took monopoly control of
postal services and tasked Rowland Hill with its introduction. The new service
was launched in May 1840 with a postage-paid machine-printed illustrated (or
Envelope with advertising from 1905 pictorial) version of the wrapper and the much-celebrated first adhesive
used in the U.S. postage stamp: the Penny Black- for the production of which the Jacob Perkins
printing process was used to deter counterfeiting and forgery. The wrappers
were printed and sold as a sheet of 12, with cutting the purchaser's task.
Known as Mulready stationery, because the illustration was created by the respected artist William Mulready, the
envelopes were withdrawn when the illustration was ridiculed and lampooned. Nevertheless, the public apparently saw
the convenience of the wrappers being available ready-shaped, and it must have been obvious that with the stamp
available totally plain versions of the wrapper could be produced and postage prepaid by purchasing a stamp and affixing
it to the wrapper once folded and secured. In this way although the postage-prepaid printed pictorial version died
ignominiously, the diamond-shaped wrapper acquired de facto official status and became readily available to the public
notwithstanding the time taken to cut them out and the waste generated. With the issuing of the stamps and the operation
and control of the service (which is a communications medium) in government hands the British model spread around the
world and the diamond-shaped wrapper went with it.
Hill also installed his brother Edwin as The Controller of Stamps, and it was he with his partner Warren De La Rue who
patented the machine for mass-producing the diamond-shaped sheets for conversion to envelopes in 1845. Today,
envelope-making machine manufacture is a long- and well-established international industry, and blanks are produced
with a short-arm-cross shape and a kite shape as well as diamond shape. (The short-arm-cross style is mostly encountered
in "pocket" envelopes i.e. envelopes with the closing flap on a short side. The more common style, with the closing flap on
a long side, are sometimes referred to as "standard" or "wallet" style for purposes of differentiation.)
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The most famous paper-making machine was the Fourdrinier machine. The
process involves taking processed pulp stock and converting it to a continuous
web which is gathered as a reel. Subsequently, the reel is guillotined edge to
edge to create a large number of properly rectangular sheets because ever since
the invention of Gutenberg's press paper has been closely associated with
printing.
To this day, all other mechanical printing and duplicating equipments devised
in the meantime, including the typewriter (which was used up to the 1990s for
addressing envelopes), have been primarily designed to process rectangular
Envelope-making machines at the
sheets. Hence the large sheets are in turn are guillotined down to the sizes of Post Office Savings Bank, Blythe
rectangular sheet commonly used in the commercial printing industry, and House, West Kensington, London
nowadays to the sizes commonly used as feed-stock in office-grade computer
printers, copiers and duplicators (mainly ISO, A4 and US Letter).
Using any mechanical printing equipment to print on envelopes, which
although rectangular, are in fact folded sheets with differing thicknesses across
their surfaces, calls for skill and attention on the part of the operator. In
commercial printing the task of printing on machine-made envelopes is
referred to as "overprinting" and is usually confined to the front of the
envelope. If printing is required on all four flaps as well as the front, the
process is referred to as "printing on the flat". Eye-catching illustrated
envelopes or pictorial envelopes, the origins of which as an artistic genre can
be attributed to the Mulready stationery and which was printed in this way -
are used extensively for direct mail. In this respect, direct mail envelopes have
a shared history with propaganda envelopes (or "covers") as they are called by Machine Envelope Printer was one
philatelists. of the machine presses at the Bulaq
Press. It present now in Bibliotheca
Alexandrina
Present and future state of envelopes
At the end of the 20th century, in 1998, the digital printing revolution
delivered another benefit for small businesses when the U.S. Postal Service became the first postal authority to approve
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 innovative alternative to an adhesive-backed postage stamp as the basis for an
Electronic Stamp Distribution (ESD) service, a business envelope could be produced in-house, addressed and customised
with advertising information on the face, and ready to be mailed.
The fortunes of the commercial envelope manufacturing industry and the postal service go hand in hand, and both link to
the printing industry and the mechanized envelope processing industry producing equipments such as franking and
addressing machines. They are all four symbiotic: technological developments affecting one obviously ricochet through the
others: addressing machines print addresses, postage stamps are a print product, franking machines imprint a frank on an
envelope. If fewer envelopes are required; fewer stamps are required; fewer franking machines are required and fewer
addressing machines are required. For example, the advent and adoption of information-based indicia (IBI) (commonly
referred to as digitally-encoded electronic stamps or digital indicia) by the US Postal Service in 1998 caused widespread
consternation in the franking machine industry, as their equipments were effectively rendered obsolescent and resulted in
a flurry of lawsuits involving Pitney Bowes among others. The advent of e-mail in the late 1990s appeared to offer a
substantial threat to the postal service. By 2008 letter-post service operators were reporting significantly smaller volumes
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of letter-post, specifically stamped envelopes, which they attributed mainly to replacement by e-mail. Although a
corresponding reduction in the volume of envelopes required would have been expected, no such decrease was reported as
widely as the reduction in letter-post volumes.
Although as regards e-mail developments there is a substantial threat of "technology replacing tradition", this is offset by
the equal reasoning that the Universal Postal Union is an international specialised agency of the United Nations, and a
source of revenue for government. Consequently, any deterioration of domestic and international postal services attended
by loss of revenue is a matter of governmental concern.
Types of envelopes
Windowed envelopes
A windowed envelope is an envelope with a plastic or glassine window in it.
The plastic in these envelopes creates problems in paper recycling. Consumers
who do not want to go through the trouble of ripping out the plastic window
should put the envelope in a trash bag after use.
Security envelopes
Security envelopes have special tamper-resistant and tamper-evident features.
Windowed envelope
They are used for high value products and documents as well as for evidence
for legal proceedings.
Some security envelopes have a patterned tint printed on the inside, which makes it difficult to read the contents. Various
patterns exist.[9]
Mailers
Some envelopes are available for full size documents. Some carriers have large mailing envelopes for their express
services. Other similar envelopes are available at stationery supply locations.
These mailers usually have an opening on an end with a flap that can be attached by gummed adhesive, integral pressure-
sensitive adhesive , adhesive tape, or security tape. Construction is usually:
Paperboard
Corrugated fiberboard
Polyethylene, often a coextrusion
Nonwoven fabric
Padded mailers
Shipping envelopes can have padding to provide stiffness and some degree of cushioning. The padding can be ground
newsprint, plastic foam sheets, or bubble packing.
See also
Back-of-the-envelope calculation Envelope character in the Dingbats section of
Unicode
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Return address Red envelope, a Chinese custom
Secrecy of correspondence Green envelope, a Malay custom
References
1. "History of Envelopes" ([Link] BE. Retrieved
27 December 2014. "Window envelopes have a small plastic pane that fits an address printed onto the letter inside.
Windowed envelopes soon became the standard for business envelopes, as they reduce the time and cost required
to send mail while still ensuring it gets delivered to its intended destination."
2. "US 701839 A" ([Link] Retrieved 27 December 2014.
3. A software company's information on US and ([Link]
ISO international standard envelope styles and sizes
4. "Mulready stationery: Lettersheets and envelopes" ([Link]
[Link]). The Queen's Own: Stamps That Changed the World. National Postal Museum. Retrieved 2006-09-25.
5. "Sizes for Letters" ([Link] USPS. 2016. Retrieved 2016-12-24.
6. Tsien, Tsuen-Hsuin (1985). "Paper and Printing". Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Chemistry and
Chemical Technology. 5 part 1. Cambridge University Press: 38.
7. Joseph Needham (1985). Science and Civilisation in China: Paper and Printing ([Link]
x-9mS6Aa4wC&pg=PA122). Cambridge University Press. p. 122. ISBN 978-0-521-08690-5. "In the Southern Sung
dynasty, gift money for bestowing upon officials by the imperial court was wrapped in paper envelopes (chih pao)"
8. "The Heroic Age" ([Link]
=true). Making the Modern World. Retrieved 2012-11-06.
9. See Security Patterns ([Link] by Joseph King for a
selection of security patterns from around the world
External links
Maynard H. Benjamin (2002). "History of Envelopes" ([Link]
[Link]) (PDF). Envelope Manufacturers Association. Available via the Smithsonian National Postal Museum
"ISO 216:2007 - Writing paper and certain classes of printed matter" ([Link]
c/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=36631). International Organization for Standardization.
Markus Kuhn. "International standard paper sizes" ([Link] University of
Cambridge. the ISO 216 paper size system and the ideas behind its design.
Bodleian Library (2001). "De la Rue's Stationery Stand and Envelope Machine (1851)" ([Link]
ohnson/online-exhibitions/a-nation-of-shopkeepers/the-great-exhibition). John Johnson Collection Exhibition.
University of Oxford.
Gerard Hughes. "Envelope and Letterfolding" ([Link] Methods from the Envelope and Letter
Folding Association
Alex Macmillan. "Letterfu envelopes templates" ([Link] (Creative Commons)
paper-papers. "Help understanding US envelope sizes" ([Link] (US
Envelope Sizes)
Retrieved from "[Link]
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