Nothing Rare, Just A Simple Question About 2 Different Cover Cancels

Hello everyone, this is 3 covers from the first Flight betwen Baltimore and Bermuda , all the same date and same time. On those covers and many others I have see you have 2 differents size of cancels, since it's a kind of FDC, I will expect they was all done at the smae place with the same cancel. I don't collect US covers, , this is because it's related to Bermuda, is this common to do this ?

as you see nothing special, just a question ( unfortunatly the 2 cents coils are the cheap type, will have been nice if not , lol )

The top two are machine cancels, the bottom one is a hand stamp.

Both coil pairs appear to be joint line pairs. That's not that common for a first flight cover.

Since you talk about the coil here a scan , they will stay on the cover, I have both pair mint in my album, Lighthouse with their pair :( , I know it's better but quite more expensive

but still; why they use 2 differents cancel ? By the way the hand one have been hit twice, you have 2 impressions nearly one over the other, I don't like that, it make the thing less clean...

Could be that the machine missed the cover with the two coils?


Peter

Peter that will be a good explanation, but I think 1/3 of the covers was hand stamped, nothing that will make lost my sleep, I was just wonder

A lot of those FAM covers was addressed to J.D. Schunck

Alas, both 2 cent stamps are type I 599's. It would have been quite a cover if they had been both type II (599A) or a compound pair.

On the second cover, before running it through the cancelling machine, some clerk probably noticed a machine cancel would not cancel all stamps. So he used a hand cancel instead. And the clerk was thorough. After missing the two rightmost stamps, the clerk then used the same device to cancel them, covering up the round portion with a piece of paper. Neat and properly cancelled, though not to your taste. Other collectors would complain about uncancelled stamps if otherwise.

When stamps were placed in both the expected spot and also elsewhere, you can find both type cancels used on the same cover. The sender typically applied the stamps on these covers and some of them would go crazy. And expensive line pairs were relatively expensive then. Since these covers were typically sent in by collectors, you wouldn't expect anything premium to be used. Although if you really wanted, a #C3a could be used for postage ...

599A was not even in the catalog until 1936 (although it was issued in 1929), but by 1940 it did have a substantial premium so it probably had one in 1938 as well.

On the other hand, I once came across a fake 579 which had been made from a 599A, so strange things sometimes did happen.

May be they offer to buyers hand or machine cancel ? all the one I have seen are from 7 am, they must have been cancel at the same place , By the quantity of them available , I think all the flight was philatelists cover.

The illustrated covers are American Air Mail Society Catalog number F17-2. This was flown by Pan American Airways on their Sikorski S-42 flying boat, the Bermuda Clipper, by pilot R.O.D. Sullivan, under their contract with the US post office, "Foreign Airmail Route (FAM) Number 17". These are extremely common covers since there were 71,113 flown on that first flight on the Baltimore to Bermuda leg. Less common are the return leg of the first flight from Bermuda back to Baltimore. There were a great many first flight covers hand canceled so there is no real difference in values between the two. Of slightly more interest are covers that have a receiving cancel at Hamilton with the year 36 in the slug rather than 38, but from what I can tell there seem to be little shortage of covers with either the error or the correct date in the Hamilton receiving cancel. The going rate of postage for airmail from the US to Bermuda was 10 cents per half ounce so the three covers shown all have the correct postage. The ones many collectors try to have in their first flight cover collection are ones that are autographed by the pilot, Captain Sullivan.

Unless the sender was at the specific post office that handled the flight mail, I doubt this could be done. Most people would use the then-current postage for franking; they had to prepare the envelope themselves and mail it in another envelope. With thousands of covers, it would make sense to use a machine canceller. If stamps were going to be missed or were missed by the machine, it would be hand cancelled, just like any other mail handled at large post offices at the time.



Of course most FFCs are philatelic; even US Graf Zeppelin covers are mostly that. The date for the first flight was announced and instructions for senders was given in the philatelic papers, perhaps in the general newspapers too, some of which had stamp columns. If you sent a cover in specifically for the flight and it got to the originating post office a week in advance, they would hold the cover. No business would want that, except for maybe the airline(s) promoting the service to their big customers, the post office getting a few to give to Pres. Roosevelt for his collection.

Most individuals who wanted to prepare their own first flight covers had to prepare their covers and then put them in an outer envelope and send them to the relevant post office by a deadline date prior to the flight. I am sure those were most of the ones that were machine cancelled. On the other hand, savvy dealers like Mr. Shunck and the other pros who made money preparing and selling first flights would often personally go to the relevant post office and either have the clerk hand cancel their covers, or if the dealer was sly enough they would sweet talk the clerk into letting the dealer do the hand canceling at the counter to ensure each cover received a nice clear cancel. This was important to most professional dealers since they would not be able to get full price for any of their covers that did not have clear cancels. Both dealers and private collectors would often use colorful and interesting postage stamps on their covers, including odd or out of date ones that were still valid but made their covers more interesting looking. I think most of the professional dealers tended to go for nice airmail stamps on the majority of their covers since they knew most collectors preferred the fancy airmail stamps on their airmail covers. This is still true today for the majority of first flight cover collectors - they strongly prefer airmail stamps on their covers and they normally do not add any premium for rare stamps unless they were printed especially for that given flight or set of flights and even then, the premium is already built into the catalog value. Covers without such premium stamps are heavily discounted to account for the lack of the expected premiums stamps.

Kimo, thanks it's make sense. a lot of sense