- Even in today's digital age, physical mail still has a place...
Strange Ways Mail Has Been Delivered Throughout History
Mail delivery has taken some unusual forms whenever ordinary routes were closed, too expensive or missing. Letters and parcels have crossed battle lines by air and traveled in the care of animals, and for a short time in the United States the parcels included small children. Several of these methods were improvised in emergencies, while others grew out of loopholes in new postal rules. Comparing them with the way important mail moves now makes the changes easy to see.
How Important Mail Moves Today
Senders can print Certified Mail Labels on an office printer and follow USPS tracking from acceptance through delivery or attempted delivery, with the confirmation stored in an online account. That level of detail was out of reach for most of postal history, when a letter’s progress depended on trust and on the speed of a horse, ship or train. The unusual methods below all tried to solve problems that scanners and signatures now handle without fuss. Even ordinary packages collect scans at each handoff, which gives senders a record that earlier postmasters couldn’t offer.
Balloons and Pigeons Over Paris
During the siege of Paris in 1870, the city’s postal service sent mail out of the besieged city by balloon, with dozens of flights carrying millions of letters over the Prussian lines. Balloons could only drift with the wind and couldn’t come back, so they also carried homing pigeons that returned with messages on tiny photographic film. Clerks in Paris enlarged each film, copied the messages and passed them to their recipients. The birds were kept at bases outside the city until the film was ready, then released to fly back toward their home lofts in Paris.
Children in the Parcel Post
When parcel post began in 1913, a few parents noticed that the rules didn’t exclude children, and an Ohio couple mailed their baby son to his grandmother a few weeks later for 15 cents in postage. Stories of children being mailed through rural routes followed, including a young girl in Idaho who rode in a train’s mail compartment to visit her grandparents. Mail carriers were trusted to look after the young passengers, and the children usually traveled with a postal employee instead of sitting in a sack with the other parcels. The weight limit was part of the appeal, since a child under the limit could cost less to send than a train ticket. Postal officials stopped the practice within a few years.
Mules Still on the Route
Mail for the village of Supai, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, still travels down a trail about eight miles long on pack mules six days a week. Outgoing parcels from the village post office receive a special mailed-by-mule marking. Each mule can carry about 200 pounds, and the packs hold supplies such as food and medicine along with letters, since no road reaches the village.
Each of these routes existed because ordinary delivery couldn’t reach the person waiting for the letter, and each was replaced or regulated as better systems arrived. Today’s labels, tracking numbers and signatures serve the same goal, which is getting the right item to the right person with a record of the trip.