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 & Giles Penny & Giles Penny & Giles (P&G) was a British engineering company in Dorset (former Hampshire) that made flight recorders (black boxes). The company was founded in 1956 by Prof William Alfred Penny and James Giles. It made high-reliability wire-wound potentiometers for aircraft in flight testing. In 1957 it made the first aircraft data recorder with magnetic recording on a stainless steel wire, known as a "black box". In 1963, the Ministry of Aviation informed the UK aircraft industry that all civil airliners would have to have flight data recorders. In April 1973, Penny and Giles Conductive Plastics received a