Emanuel Herrmann

Emanuel Alexander Herrmann (24 June 1839 in Klagenfurt, Austria – 13 July 1902 in Vienna) was an Austrian national economist. He is considered the decisive last in an international line of inventors of the postal card.

After graduating with a law doctorate from the University of Vienna, Emanuel Herrmann, the son of the Bezirkshauptmann (district administrator) of Klagenfurt, entered the civil service in the Austrian ministry of commerce and qualified for a university career as a "Privatdozent" in the field of national economics. He was also a professor at the renowned Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt and from 1882 for twenty years professor of national economics at Vienna's Institute of Technology.

On 26 January 1869 he published an article in Austria's leading paper Neue Freie Presse "Über eine neue Art des Korrespondenzmittels der Post", (i.e. "About a novel means of postal correspondence"), proposing that all envelope-size cards, whether written, produced by copying machine or printed, ought to be admitted as mail if they contained not more than 20 words including address and sender's signature and showed a 2-Kreuzer postage stamp. Regular letter postage was 5 Kreuzers.

Austria-Hungary's Postmaster General Vincenz Baron Maly von Vevanovič took up the idea, and in September 1869 the "Correspondence Card" was officially introduced in Austria by ministerial order. From 1 Oktober 1869 Austria's General Post Office was to issue postal cards for very brief messages, which, at a prize of two "Neukreuzers" (new Kreuzers), were to be delivered to any place within the dual monarchy, irrespective of the distance involved. The 20-word maximum was dropped. The front of the "correspondence card" showed the address, the rear was reserved for the message; apart from the two-headed eagle of Austria on the address side, or the Hungarian coat of arms in the Hungarian half of the dual monarchy, there were no pictures of any kind.

...
Wikipedia