Today, it can be difficult to think about not having the luxury of looking down at our phones or computers as a means to receive information. It's not really a second thought to any of us that we use technology to send messages and information around the world instantaneously, we just do it. While many of us have this luxury and go about our daily lives, do we really consider where the luxury first originated from? Although popular technology is used by millions of people every day, very few people actually know the history behind how technology came to be what it is today through other means of communication historically. In this blog, I am going to explain the creation and evolution of a term probably foreign to this generation, "written communication" developed by the postal service.
We rely on present-day means of communication such as text messaging and emailing, but it is based on communication that is thousands of years old. The earliest evidence of a written language actually dates back to ancient Sumer between 4100- 3800 BC. In this means of written communication, marks were pressed into clay tablets and were used as records for land, cattle, and grain. As writing had developed, it was used more for record-keeping. Overtime, letter writing became the most reliable means of long-distance communication, as it became essential to make sure letters were delivered, a job of great importance. We jump into the idea of an actual postal service by 900 BC. China had developed a postal service for the delivery of messages to provide communication between the government. In continuation of the newest Postal Service innovation, later, in 100 A.D., Rome used couriers to deliver messages to different corners of the empire. In fact, during the dark ages, the European monastery had developed a letter system in which royal messengers sent messages between ruling leaders, but a single organized method of sending and receiving letters for the common people.
Until the 16th century, when private mail systems began to appear in Europe and in the American colonies, mail was delivered by giving the message to an individual going in the direction the letter was supposed to and hoping it would arrive. In 1653, a French man named Jean-Jacquees Renouard de Villayer Established a postal system in which he set up mailboxes and delivered any letters placed in them if they used the Postage prepaid envelopes that he sold. Unfortunately, his business did not last long when a person decided to put live mice in the mailboxes which scared away his customers. Then, jumping ahead to 1837, a schoolmaster from England, Rowland Hill invented the adhesive postage stamp. The first person to stamp in the world was issued in England in 1840. Hills stamps were known to make pre-payment of postage both possible and practical. Today, the Universal Postal Union, which was established in 1874, includes 192 Countries and set rules for international mail exchanges.
Several individual postal systems became active in the colonies around 1673, but it wasn't until 1775 when Benjamin Franklin became the first postmaster general of the United States and the United States Postal Service was formed, that a single coherent system was implemented. The United States Postal Service is one of the Government agencies explicitly authorized by the United States Constitution. By 1860, the Pony Express branch of the Postal Service was created as a means of providing fast, reliable mail delivery to the western territories. In fact, Benjamin Franklin made numerous improvements to the mail system including setting up new, more efficient colonial routes that cut delivery time in half between Philadelphia in New York by having the weekly mail wagon travel both day and night via relay teams. He also debuted the first-rate chart, which standardized delivery cost based on distance and weight. Messages along the express could travel the distance from Missouri to California in about 10 days. From technological advancements such as planes, trains, and cars, around the world, mail delivery time was shortened. However, the mail service remained limited in terms of the time it took for a letter to get from the writer to the receiver of the mail.
Today, the United States has over 40,000 post offices in Postal Service that delivers 212 billion pieces of mail each year to over 144 million homes and businesses in the United States, Puerto Rico, Guam, the American Virgin Islands, and American Samoa. The Postal Service is also the nation's largest civilian employer, with over 700,000 career workers Who handle more than 44% of the world's cards and letters. The Postal Service is a Not-for-profit self-supporting agency that covers its expenses through the postage stamp in the United States which started in 1847 and related products.
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| By the end of the year, this is the stack of mail I ended up with! It feels very rewarding! |
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/u-s-postal-system-established
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