SELF-INKING STAMPS – THE CRAZE THAT’S SWEEPING THE WORLD

Unbelievable as it may be, rubber stamps and other custom stamps owe their existence to tribes of Indians in the jungles of South America.

A few hundred years ago, in the early 1730s, a curious French scientist by the name of Charles Marie de la Condamine is said to have seen some tribal members playing with a bouncy ball made from a sticky substance which they also used as an adhesive to attach adornments such as feathers onto their body – and he was so intrigued by this, that he sent a sample off to the Institute de France in Paris.  ’India’ rubber remained a rare and scare commodity and didn’t really capture attention until around 30 years later, when the scientist who discovered oxygen, Sir Joseph Priestly remarked that it was ‘…excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the mark of black lead pencil’…but despite this, the ‘rubber’ of choice at that time remained bread crumbs (seriously!).

It was a few years later that the rubber ‘code’ was cracked – by entrepreneur Charles Goodyear, who dedicated a chunk of his life and a massive chunk of his income (reportedly even selling his children’s school books for cash for his experiments) to work out how to make rubber impervious to temperature changes.

As soon as rubber had been commercially made, it was inevitable that rubber stamps would be invented.  The historical origins of the first rubber stamps aren’t documented, although there are plenty of theories about what, who and when, but when the first ink stamp was produced, it was probably to mark information on manufactured goods. 

What is definitive however, is that stamps of all kinds, rubber stamps, ink stamps, personalised stamps and custom stamps – have become enormously popular around the world among crafters, hobbyists, scrapbooking enthusiasts .  Little wonder then that rubber stamping has such a strong following ….after all…doesn’t everyone want to leave their own individual mark on the world ?.

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