A stamp of abdication
QUESTION Were Edward VIII stamps issued by the Royal Mail? EDwArD VIII came to the throne on January 20, 1936, on the death of his father, George V. The first stamps with his portrait (½d, 1½d, 2½d) were issued on september 1, with the 1d stamp following on september 14.
The original design was to feature Edward in the uniform of Colonel-in-Chief of the seaforth highlanders, but the Palace rejected this as it wanted a more contemporary image for the new king.
Profile pictures by hugh Cecil were taken in March 1936. remarkably, the final design chosen was created by 18- year- old schoolboy hubert John Brown. he recalled how, when sitting an examination in 1936, his thoughts strayed, and he began to wonder what sort of stamps there should be for the new reign.
he sketched a rough design and submitted it to the Postmaster-General. he received a letter of acknowledgement by return with the comment: ‘I should perhaps mention, however, that the design is usually chosen from the competitive designs of distinguished artists.’
Yet the King rejected all the professional designs in favour of that submitted by Mr Brown which was simple in format, quite different from anything that had gone before.
Just as it took several months from the death of George V before the new monarch’s stamps were available, the first George VI stamps weren’t available until several months after the abdication on December 11, 1936. In fact, Edward VIII stamps were still being dispensed from stamp machines until the beginning of 1938. As the definitive postage stamps of the period, they were sold in their hundreds of thousands.
Following the abdication, many people hoarded them, believing they would become valuable, but ironically this had the opposite effect, devaluing the stamps for collectors. Today, a full set in mint condition is worth only about £1.
J. T. Thomas, Melton Mowbray, Leics.
QUESTION If a laser is fired vertically upwards, will it eventually disappear as it loses energy?
LAsEr light does not obey the inverse square law, which is obeyed by electromagnetic radiation spreading out from a ‘point’ source. Lasers provide nearly parallel beams of light that hardly spread out at all and are not point sources.
The inverse square law is a result of the light spreading out and therefore reducing in intensity (the energy becomes more dilute). It is not due to energy conversion. If laser light is passing through space, its energy is not converted to heat — there is virtually no matter for it to interact with.
Light passing through matter loses energy to heat in a process that is called attenuation, and this is nothing to do with the inverse square law.
The fact that laser light hardly spreads out is used to measure the distance to the Moon accurately. reflectors have been left on the Moon and directed laser light from Earth is reflected back. The time delay between sending and receiving the signal enables the distance to be accurately calculated.
The conclusion that the light can travel an infinite distance is correct, but the explanation is not. The light will become weaker and weaker, but much more slowly than if it obeyed the inverse square and will never totally disappear. Eric Fogg (head of physics, retd),
Chessington, Surrey.
QUESTION Cabbage is a ‘piano word’, one that can be spelled out using the musical notes of an octave. What other piano words are there?
ThErE are hundreds of piano words containing the letters ABCDEFG. Bad, edge, fade, bade, egg, decade, cage etc. There are nine examples with seven letters or more — baggage, cabbage, cabbaged, debadge, debagged, defaced, effaced, facaded and feedbag.
Proper nouns conforming to this rule include Babbage, the surname of Charles Babbage ( 1791- 1871), credited with inventing the mechanical computer; and
fabaceae, the family of flowering plants known commonly as the legume, pea or bean family.
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