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Rowland Hill and the Dragon's Den
Dec. 1st, 2007 04:27 pm"So", said my mum, "I've just about got all my Christmas Cards done. Lucky that they're all a small size, what with the different charges for larger envelopes now."
"The madman, dear mother, was Rowland Hill," said I.
"How so?" said she.
Well, imagine this. Rowland Hill turns up in the Dragon's Den sometime in 1839. He is possessed of two ideas. One is a boardgame based on the currently developing railways, a game called 1830. Unfortunately, this 'entertainment' consisted only of one type of train and the entire map consisted of three hexes. It was thrown out fairly promptly, despite Mr Hill's assurances that the game was "eminently expandable".
His second idea consisted of the adhesive postage stamp, enabling people to prepay for postal communications.
"It's brilliant", he explains. "You go to a shop, a "Post Office' and you buy your stamps in advance, Then, when you want to send a letter, you stick on the stamp, pop it into specially constructed boxes that will soon, mark my words, be on every High Street. Then a guy comes along and collects it and, by miracles of modern communication created by the railway, it gets delivered anywhere within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland".
"Hmm", say the Dragon's Den team. "We like it." But, what's the business model here? How do you adjust for pricing on distance travelled, weight and size? What's your rate per mile, for example?"
"Ah HAH!", says Mr Hill. "That's the beauty of it. Provided the communication is below a certain weight -- all ordinary letters will qualify -- it will cost one penny, no matter how far the letter travels. And, here's the killer! The stamp will have the Queen's head on it! Everyone knows that you only have to put an image of the Queen on the front cover of a popular magazine for sales to nearly double. In fact, I foresee people collecting the stams and not even using them!"
"So", says one of the team, looking perplexed, "you intend to charge the same fee to deliver a letter a mile down teh road as you will charge to send a letter from Land's End to The Orkneys?"
"Absolutely".
"Get the fuck out of here".
The Swiss, less concerned with whinges from far-flung places in the country that they were being unfairly treated, copied the idea of an adhesive postage stamp, but realized that you had to charge according to cost of processing. Whht, they would ask, should some person in the far east of the country be subsidized by people in the capital?
It took the introduction of the profit motive for the Post Office to realize that private firms could serve compact areas far more cheaply than they could. The Post Office called this "cherry-picking" and "unfair". Mysteriously, the press didn't print the observation that for well over 100 years those living in highly populated areas had been overcharged for the postal service.
+++++++++++++++
I have a mouse. I did have two mouses, but one of them is deaded.
It seems that everyone in London has mice at the moment. The office has pest control boxes everywhere. One of my work colleagues had a mouse. Bush House (home of the World Service) apparently has lots of mice. It's a fucking mouse-wave.
The problem with my kitchen is that, being in a Victorian house, there are gaps everywhere.
I started by plugging up the gaps that I plugged up when I first moved in (there was quite a rodent infestation that took a couple of months to clear). But, down I would go each evening and turn on the light, and off he would scurry, finding a new gap that I hadn't thought of.
( mouse attack )
"The madman, dear mother, was Rowland Hill," said I.
"How so?" said she.
Well, imagine this. Rowland Hill turns up in the Dragon's Den sometime in 1839. He is possessed of two ideas. One is a boardgame based on the currently developing railways, a game called 1830. Unfortunately, this 'entertainment' consisted only of one type of train and the entire map consisted of three hexes. It was thrown out fairly promptly, despite Mr Hill's assurances that the game was "eminently expandable".
His second idea consisted of the adhesive postage stamp, enabling people to prepay for postal communications.
"It's brilliant", he explains. "You go to a shop, a "Post Office' and you buy your stamps in advance, Then, when you want to send a letter, you stick on the stamp, pop it into specially constructed boxes that will soon, mark my words, be on every High Street. Then a guy comes along and collects it and, by miracles of modern communication created by the railway, it gets delivered anywhere within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland".
"Hmm", say the Dragon's Den team. "We like it." But, what's the business model here? How do you adjust for pricing on distance travelled, weight and size? What's your rate per mile, for example?"
"Ah HAH!", says Mr Hill. "That's the beauty of it. Provided the communication is below a certain weight -- all ordinary letters will qualify -- it will cost one penny, no matter how far the letter travels. And, here's the killer! The stamp will have the Queen's head on it! Everyone knows that you only have to put an image of the Queen on the front cover of a popular magazine for sales to nearly double. In fact, I foresee people collecting the stams and not even using them!"
"So", says one of the team, looking perplexed, "you intend to charge the same fee to deliver a letter a mile down teh road as you will charge to send a letter from Land's End to The Orkneys?"
"Absolutely".
"Get the fuck out of here".
The Swiss, less concerned with whinges from far-flung places in the country that they were being unfairly treated, copied the idea of an adhesive postage stamp, but realized that you had to charge according to cost of processing. Whht, they would ask, should some person in the far east of the country be subsidized by people in the capital?
It took the introduction of the profit motive for the Post Office to realize that private firms could serve compact areas far more cheaply than they could. The Post Office called this "cherry-picking" and "unfair". Mysteriously, the press didn't print the observation that for well over 100 years those living in highly populated areas had been overcharged for the postal service.
+++++++++++++++
I have a mouse. I did have two mouses, but one of them is deaded.
It seems that everyone in London has mice at the moment. The office has pest control boxes everywhere. One of my work colleagues had a mouse. Bush House (home of the World Service) apparently has lots of mice. It's a fucking mouse-wave.
The problem with my kitchen is that, being in a Victorian house, there are gaps everywhere.
I started by plugging up the gaps that I plugged up when I first moved in (there was quite a rodent infestation that took a couple of months to clear). But, down I would go each evening and turn on the light, and off he would scurry, finding a new gap that I hadn't thought of.
( mouse attack )
