The postcard is over 150 years old (and it isn't finished yet)
Published on 30 July 2026 · 3 min read
There is probably a postcard lying around your place right now, wedged into a book or stuck to the fridge. That little rectangle has a longer past than you would guess, and it doesn't begin with poetry. It begins with an economist doing sums.
An economist's idea, not a poet's
Vienna, 1869. Emanuel Herrmann, a professor of economics, publishes a thoroughly unromantic proposal in the press: since most messages fit into a few lines, why seal them in an envelope and pay full letter rates? The Austro-Hungarian post takes him at his word and puts the Correspondenz-Karte on sale on 1 October 1869. No envelope, half the price, a few centimetres of space. Within three months, millions were in circulation. France picked it up during the war of 1870, then made it official a few years later.
The day the picture showed up
At first the card was bare: one side for the address, one for the message, nothing to look at. Everything changed when illustration arrived. In 1889, during the World's Fair, a card was sold at the top of the Eiffel Tower and visitors posted it from up there, still slightly out of breath. The formula was set: send proof you were there. Then came the golden age, from 1900 to the First World War. Everything got photographed, the beaches, the village squares, the families in their Sunday best. With several mail deliveries a day, you could write in the morning to arrange the afternoon.
The dip, and the comeback
The telephone, then email, then instant messaging chipped away at all that. The postcard retreated into holidays, a sort of summer courtesy. And yet it holds on, for exactly the reason it was invented: it's short, it's tangible, it asks nothing back. What has changed is the picture. It no longer comes from a regional publisher but from your camera roll, and printing and postage take a few minutes, from 2.29 € all in. The gesture itself hasn't moved in a hundred and fifty years: pick a photo, write four lines, think of someone.