Morley-Bright

Morley-Bright has been manufacturing watermark detectors since 1976 when the original detector was invented by Walter Bright, a lifelong philatelist. Unable to find a successful way of finding watermarks on stamps, he experimented until he found one. Until then Walter had been manufacturing albums and accessories for housing coins. Walter has always been one of life's inventors - developments and techniques he devised while working in the construction industry 40 years ago are still standard processes today.

In the early years of Morley-Bright, Walter regularly demonstrated the watermark detector at stamp shows in the UK and USA. When he retired in1989 he moved to the north east corner of Scotland. Now aged 86 he is still an active philatelist. The present owner of the company, Jackie Day, knew and worked with Walter Bright before the days of the watermark detector and helped him develop the original version.

The home of Morley-Bright is now a farmhouse that dates back around 400-500 years located on the edge of the Dartmoor National Park in the south west of England. Morley-Bright shares the farm with a variety of animals including an American Quarter Horse, a Welsh Pony and various breeds of rare and endangered sheep. Although there are a number of small villages around the edges of the moor, these days Dartmoor itself is populated by only a handful of farmers, its chief occupants being the tens of thousands of sheep, cattle and ponies that roam freely over it. Scattered across the moor are numerous remains of Stone Age settlements; although the spectacular terrain and sometimes inhospitable climate attracts many visitors every year, few would want to follow in the steps of the ancient settlers and actually live there.

In the years since the prototype watermark detector was invented, Morley-Bright has supplied detectors throughout the world. The Inst-a-tector and Roll-a-tector are used by collectors and dealers as well as by expert committees for authentication purposes. In some countries stamps have been unwatermarked for decades, whereas other countries used watermarks for many more years. The ability to determine watermark varieties on stamps is one of the things that has added a new dimension to stamp collecting, with the added bonus that some watermark varieties can add significant amounts to the values of stamps.