QSL Card, Ilwaco, North Head Lighthouse
A few weeks back I sold my first QSL card. I had to google them to find out what they were and how they were used, so I thought it might be helpful to share a bit of the information that I found.
According to Wikipedia, QSL cards are exchanged between amateur radio operators “to confirm two-way radio contact between stations. Each card contains details about one or more contacts, the station and its operator. At a minimum, this includes the call sign of both stations participating in the contact, the time and date when it occurred (usually specified in UTC), the radio frequency or Band used, the mode of transmission used, and a signal report. One national association of amateur radio operators, the IARU Region #2, recommends a size of 3½ by 5½ inches (89 mm by 140 mm).”
QSL cards are mostly collected by other ham radio operators. Although they look like a postcard, a QSL is really a ham radio operator’s calling card and are frequently an expression of individual creativity. They are frequently created with individual pride and reflect the sender’s personality or profession. Consequently, the collecting of QSL cards of especially interesting designs has become an add-on hobby to the simple gathering of printed documentation of a ham’s communications over the course of his or her radio career.
Here’s a link to a video of an especially interesing collector
Martin Luther,Australia's King of QSL Cards
The Chrome Era is generally considered to be from 1939 to the present.
Here’s an informative summary from Postcards of Hamilton
“Today we think of chromes as any modern, glossy surfaced card. The term “chrome” originated with Kodak’s Kodachrome film. This colour-reversal film that could be used to produce positive images was first introduced in 1935. It was not long before photographers and printing firms (including postcard manufacturers) began to use colour positives. Chromes were the first colour postcards produced from colour film and printed with the photo-mechanical halftone process. The “chrome era” begins with the publication of a series of 85 chrome postcards by the Union Oil Company of California in 1939. The cards originated in the San Francisco office and were sent out to dealers to be given out free at their gas stations. Large national postcard publisher/ printers such as Mike Roberts, Plastichrome, Dexter Press, Curt Teich and others followed in the production of modern chromes. In the beginning, the traditional 3 ½” x 5 ½” size of postcard was adhered to but by the 1960s the continental size of approximately 4″ x 6″ was becoming more popular. “
Real Photo Postcards were popular from the very early 20th century to as late as the 1950s. Negatives of family photos would be sent out to photography houses which would print them up as postcards. Thus, they could be mailed to distant family and friends. The real photo postcard trend was not limited to family photos. In the early twentieth century free-lance postcard photographers roamed the world taking photos of all kinds of places and things and were paid by postcard publishers for their negatives. Some of these photographers had their own small postcard publishing businesses. These commercially-sold real photo postcards often have white hand-written captions identifying their subjects. The white writing is part of the photograph (the result of the photographer’s using a black marking pencil on the negative, which gets reversed and becomes white in the positive print).
Real Photo Postcard-Freelance Photographer
Though family portraits are probably the most common type of real photo postcard, the most valuable real photo postcards contain images of unusual and uncommon glimpses into early twentieth century life:
- people engaged in occupational activities such as working on roads, in blacksmith shops, on ships, or in any walk of life
- people in uniform– particularly military
- unusual images of animals
- images of early farm equipment such as tractors
- images of transportation including horses and buggies, early cars, boats, trains and airplanes
- images of post-disaster damage including famous tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes
- images of sports including teams, players and game being played
I’ve been reading up on ephemera on the net and the reasons that people collect ephemera are as varied as the categories that the Ephemera Society of America lists on their website. You have the specific collectors that everyone knows about, like postage stamps, baseball cards and postcards. And then you have the folks who collect anything that catches their eye. I think the bottom line is that those who collect it, do so because it gives a window on our past. A daily menu from 1938 gives us a picture of what an ordinary person did in their everyday life. This is the part of history that doesn’t get written into history books. But those little glimpses are more fascinating than the accounts written in books because it allows us to imagine how it might have been.
[polldaddy poll=1279966]
