Emanuel Herrmann

Did You Know?

• Herrmann was an important collector of the folksongs of Carinthia.
• The City of Vienna dedicated a grave of honour to him at the Meidling cemetery.
• The tombstone reads: 'Der Erfinder der Postkarte' ('The Inventor of the Postal Card').

Life and work

Emanuel Herrmann, son of the Bezirkshauptmann of Klagenfurt, earned a law doctorate from the University of Vienna and entered the civil service in the Austrian ministry of commerce. He qualified as a Privatdozent in national economics and taught at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt. From 1882 he spent twenty years as professor of national economics at Vienna's Institute of Technology. On 26 January 1869 Herrmann published an article in the Neue Freie Presse proposing that envelope-size cards, whether handwritten, copied or printed, be admitted as mail if they contained no more than twenty words including address and signature and bore a 2-Kreuzer stamp, while regular letter postage cost 5 Kreuzers. Austria-Hungary's Postmaster General Vincenz Baron Maly von Vevanovič adopted the idea, and in September 1869 the Correspondence Card was introduced by ministerial order. From 1 October 1869 the General Post Office issued postal cards for brief messages at a price of two Neukreuzers, deliverable anywhere within the dual monarchy regardless of distance; the twenty-word limit was dropped. The card's front showed the address, the rear was reserved for the message, and the only decoration was the two-headed eagle of Austria or the Hungarian coat of arms.