Penny Black printing plates Penny Black printing plates The printing plates for the Penny Black, two pence blue and the VR official were all constructed by Perkins Bacon, the printers of the first postage stamps issued in Great Britain. The construction of these plates was long and complicated, which was intentional so as to make the forgery of the finished article almost impossible. The first stage involved the engraving of a background for the design. This was produced with a rose engine which laid down a circular pattern of symmetrical design onto a piece of soft steel. This was then partly cleared to leave
Penny Black (research project) Penny Black (research project) The Penny Black Project is a Microsoft Research project that tries to find effective and practical ways of fighting spam. Because identifying spams consumes a recipient's time, the idea is to make the sender of emails "pay" a certain amount for sending them. The currency or the mode of payment could be CPU cycles, Turing tests or memory cycles. Such a payment would limit spammers' ability to send out large quantities of emails quickly. The project's name is derived from the Penny Black, the world's first adhesive stamp used for paid postage. The goal of the