10 Insane Ways People Used To Send Mail & 10 Ridiculous Things People Actually Mailed
Postage Due on the Absurd
In 1860, a letter from Missouri to California could make the trip in about 10 days, thanks to riders changing horses along the way. Since then, postal services have experimented with everything from missiles carrying mail to unusual delivery routes and vehicles. People were just as inventive about what they sent, including a baby and even a Utah bank building. Some of these methods lasted for years, while others barely made it past the trial stage. Here are 10 of the strangest ways mail has traveled and 10 of the most ridiculous items people have actually mailed.
1. The Pony Express
Starting in April 1860, Pony Express riders carried mail about 1,900 miles to Sacramento, swapping horses at stations along the way. Letters went on thin paper to save weight. The transcontinental telegraph put the Pony Express out of business in October 1861, about 18 months after the first ride.
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2. Pneumatic Tubes Under New York
From 1897 to 1953, New York City shot mail through about 27 miles of underground pneumatic tubes linking post offices in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Canisters moved at about 35 miles per hour. Paris kept its own system, the pneumatique, running until 1984.
3. Missile Mail
The submarine USS Barbero fired a Regulus cruise missile loaded with about 3,000 letters at a naval station in Mayport, Florida, in June 1959. It landed 22 minutes later with the letters intact. Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield predicted guided missiles would soon carry mail around the world, and the program never flew again.
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4. Pigeons Over Paris
When Prussian forces surrounded Paris in 1870, carrier pigeons flew messages back into the city from the unoccupied town of Tours. Officials shrank pages onto tiny sheets of film. One bird could carry thousands of messages, and clerks in Paris projected the film onto a wall and copied the letters out by hand for delivery.
5. Balloons Out of Paris
Getting mail out of the city took something bigger. Dozens of balloons lifted off during the siege with sacks of letters and a few pigeons on board, and the pilots had no way to steer them. One drifted so far off course that it came down in Norway about 15 hours after leaving Paris.
6. Mules Into the Grand Canyon
Supai, Arizona, sits at the bottom of the Grand Canyon about eight miles from the nearest road. Mule trains carry the mail in, along with residents' groceries and packages. USPS calls it the last mule delivery route in the country.
7. A Barrel on Floreana Island
Whalers passing through the Galápagos island of Floreana set up a wooden barrel as a post office in the 1790s so homeward-bound ships could collect the letters. Visitors today leave postcards without stamps and dig through the pile for ones addressed near their own homes. Then they carry them home and deliver them by hand.
8. Tin Can Mail in Tonga
The Tongan island of Niuafo'ou had no harbor where ships could dock. Mail went into sealed biscuit tins, and strong swimmers carried the tins out to ships waiting beyond the reef. Canoes eventually replaced the swimmers.
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9. Dog Sleds in Alaska
Before bush planes took over in the 1920s and 1930s, dog teams hauled mail across Alaska's interior in winter. The Iditarod Trail started out in the early 1900s as a route for mail and supplies heading to gold rush towns. The sled dog race from Anchorage to Nome follows parts of that old trail every March.
10. A Mailbox Underwater
Susami, a small town in Japan, sank a mailbox about 10 meters down in its bay in 1999. Divers drop in waterproof postcards, which post office staff collect on a regular schedule. It holds a Guinness world record as the deepest underwater postbox.
Now, here's 10 things people somehow got through the mail.
1. A Baby Boy
Parcel post started in the United States on January 1, 1913. Within weeks an Ohio couple, Jesse and Mathilda Beagle, mailed their infant son James to his grandmother about a mile away. The postage came to 15 cents, and they insured him for $50.
2. A Four-Year-Old Girl
May Pierstorff was four when her parents mailed her 73 miles across Idaho in 1914 to visit her grandparents, with the stamps attached to her coat. She rode in the train's mail car the whole way, looked after by a relative who worked as a mail clerk. The Post Office banned mailing children not long after.
3. An Entire Bank
William Coltharp needed bricks for a new bank in Vernal, Utah, in 1916. Parcel post was cheaper than freight, so he had about 80,000 bricks mailed from Salt Lake City in small packages. The Post Office responded by capping parcel post shipments at 200 pounds per sender per day.
4. The Hope Diamond
Jeweler Harry Winston donated the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian in 1958 and sent it by registered mail, insured for $1 million. Nearly all of the $145.29 in fees went to insurance, and a letter carrier named James Todd drove it to the museum. The brown paper wrapper, postmarks and all, is now on display at the National Postal Museum in Washington.
5. A Man Who Mailed Himself
Englishman W. Reginald Bray spent years testing what the Royal Mail would deliver, including a turnip and a rabbit skull with the address written straight on them. In 1900 he mailed himself. A postman walked him to the address and handed him over like any other parcel.
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6. Coconuts From Molokai
The post office in Hoolehua, on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, keeps a pile of free coconuts for visitors to mail. You write the address right on the husk in marker. After you pay the postage, the staff sends thousands of them off every year to addresses all over the world.
7. Day-Old Chicks
Hatcheries can legally ship baby chicks through the Postal Service, which has carried them since 1918. Newly hatched chicks can go about three days without food or water because they're still living off the yolk. Rural post offices hear them peeping in the back room every spring, packed in boxes with air holes along the sides.
8. Queen Bees
Beekeepers order queen bees by mail, and they arrive in small wooden cages with a few worker bees along to tend her. A plug of candy in the cage feeds the whole group on the trip. The box is marked live bees in large letters so the clerks know what's buzzing.
9. The Nation's Gold
When the Treasury moved its gold to Fort Knox in 1937, much of it traveled as registered mail on heavily guarded trains from the mints in Philadelphia and New York. Banks already used registered mail to move cash and bonds between cities.
10. A Message on a Potato
Potato Parcel, a company started in 2015, lets you mail a real potato with a custom message written on the skin. The founder, Alex Craig, pitched it on Shark Tank in 2017 and walked away with a deal from Kevin O'Leary. It costs more than a greeting card and is much harder to forget.
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