The money-saving move will only be staved off if Congress intervenes, and despite frequent suggestions from Postal Service brass dating back to 1976, legislators have been loath to cut Saturday delivery in the past. In addition, there were undoubtedly state-sponsored messages transported along the Silk Road, between traders in different empires, probably since its inception in the 3rd century BCE. These two latter routes were utilized to advance delivery of mail in connection with train service, and this was accomplished in the following manner. 3 The Army stepped in to deliver the mail, for a time but was ill prepared to fill the role of the companies that had been jilted. Eventually the tokens were done away with and a tablet with markings was used—and then writing really took off. In practice, the post offices of these days did not generally deliver mail to households or businesses directly, but only from post office to post office. Most mail was still being transported the same way in the middle of the 19th century, when stagecoaches carried letters and packages to the West coast. While an unfunded pension liability is a big reason for the USPS’ current distress, the post office could just as easily added “deficits” to the “rain, sleet, and snow” that it routinely overcomes. Se calcula que 524,000 niños trabajan inimaginables largas horas en los agotadores campos agrícolas de Estados Unidos, y todo es perfectamente legal. The first documented use of a postal system—state-sponsored, designated couriers who were trusted to transport messages—occurred in Egypt about 2400 BCE, when Pharaohs used couriers to send out decrees throughout the territory of the state. The Mail is Arriving Way too Late, Watchdog Reports, "Long-Distance Trade and Economy before and During the Age of Empires, Developments in Egypt's Early Islamic Postal System (with an Edition of P.Khalili Ii 5), The History of the Postal Monopoly in the United States, The Postal Service and the Hour as a Unit of Time in Antiquity, Spies and Mailmen and the Royal Road to Persia. Postal Service announced this morning. Mail delivery in the United States began, in fact, before the U.S. itself did. History of The United States Postal Office, History of the United States Postal Service, A Look at the 6 Technologies That Revolutionized Communications, Abbreviations for Provinces and Territories in Canada. The first mail order catalog was distributed in 1872 by Aaron Montgomery Ward (1843–1913) selling goods primarily to rural farmers who had difficulty making it out to the big cities for commerce. He set up mailboxes and delivered any letters placed in them if they used the postage pre-paid envelopes that he sold. In 1934, monopolistic contract disputes between the post office and the airmail carriers came to a head, resulting in President Roosevelt ordering the total cancellation of all contracts for air mail delivery services in what became known as the Air Mail Scandal. Rural Free Delivery is a service that began in the United States in the late 19th century to deliver mail directly to rural farm families. This thesis is to treat the history of the rural free delivery system of the United States from its beginnings to the first of July 1920. Chapter I. In 1926 the first Montgomery Ward retail store opened in Plymouth, Indiana. Mail was beginning to be streamlined internationally, and began reducing residential delivery times. Expanding Western settlement in the mid-19th century prompted the need for a reliable means of mail delivery, which was initially met by overland stagecoach companies on one of several routes and by steamship routes that either went around South America or included an overland transfer across the Isthmus of Panama or the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico. The proposal to … Courier services have evolved from carrier pigeons and horseback mailmen to air freightshipping and drone monitored delivery. The Post Office Department hired post riders who would take desolate roads hundreds of miles through treacherous conditions to deliver the mail to the various post offices. The first authorized U.S. Mail flight took place in 1911, when aviator Earle Ovington piloted his Bleriot monoplane between Garden City and Mineola, New York. At such times there is good reason to suppose papers and small packages are taken away by persons present at the opening of the portmanteau, to whom they are not directed, but without the knowledge or privity of the postmasters or carriers of the mail.”. In a case of deux ex machina unlikely to be repeated, Gifford demonstrates that an unprecedented craze for souvenir post cards – especially from rural outposts – gave the system breathing room to get its fiscal house in order and turn deficits into surpluses. The earliest surviving piece of mail is also Egyptian, which dates back to 255 BCE, recovered from the Oxyrhynchus papyri cache. By 1832, contracts were granted to use rail tra… Founding father Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first postmaster general. On July 26, 1775, the U.S. postal system is established by the Second Continental Congress, with Benjamin Franklin as its first postmaster general. A courier might bring tokens to a seller for so many bushels of grain, or so many jars of olive oil, and the seller would send the tokens with the goods back to the buyer. One of the first things the breakaway colonies did in 1775 – even before such tiddles as, say, approving a Declaration of Independence --was to recognize their own competing postal system with Benjamin Franklin at its head. Right, a woman receives a letter, 1940. There’s been government-run or officially sanctioned postal service in North America since at least 1692, when Britain’s monarchy specifically appointed a proto-postmaster, Thomas Neale, to set up a system in the colonies. If that sounds expensive, it was, and starting in 1923 many local postmasters winnowed local deliveries to one a day, although that cost-saving move wasn't universal until 1950. Hill created the first uniform postage rates that were based on weight, rather than size. Canadian electronics scientist Maurice Levy invented an automatic postal sorter in 1957 that could handle 200,000 letters an hour. Between 1861 and 1940, for example, the Post Office was in the black only eight times; the last time it wasn’t in the red was the 2006 fiscal year, and it cites public polls and its own research showing most Americans would prefer to kill Saturday delivery if it saved both money and the post office. Delivery, mail, and courier services date back to the Persian Empire in the 6 th century BCE, when King Cyrus the Great formalized a postal service. It ran a little over 10mph and was actually outran by a horse. Proof of payment is usually in the form of an adhesive postage stamp, but a postage meter is also used for bulk mailing. Prior to RFD, individuals living in remote homesteads had to pick up mail themselves at sometimes distant post offices or pay private carriers for delivery. Origins of Royal Mail 1516: Henry VIII knighted Brian Tuke, the first Master of the Posts. The first envelopes protecting such messages from prying eyes were made of cloth, animal skins or vegetable parts. These Mesopotamian envelopes called bullae were intended to deter fraud, so that the seller could be certain that the correct amount of goods would get to the buyer. 1784 Mail Delivery by Coach In 1784, a plan to speed up mail delivery and make it more reliable was devised by John Palmer, a proprietor of the Bath theater. It is one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the U.S. Constitution. Mary Bellis covered inventions and inventors for ThoughtCo for 18 years. HISTORY. Prior to that time, letters and newspapers had occasionally found their way to the military post at Fort Dearborn, carried by military couriers on a route that linked Fort Dearborn with Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Green Bay, Wisconsin. The Grumman LLV Postal Truck (Image/ Wikipedia ) A number of companies submitted designs but, in the end, the Post Office chose the Grumman LLV—and acronym that stood for “ L ong L ife V ehicle.” In 1896 the Post Office experimented with rural mail delivery, and by 1902 daily delivery was instituted across the nation (although some really remote places, like at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, only get mail three times a week) and some locales, like the beach burg of Summerland just south of Pacific Standard’s Santa Barbara, California HQ, requires mail pickup at the local post office. The start of writing occurs in Mesopotamia at least 9,500 years ago, and it involved the use of clay tokens, blobs of baked clay which had dots or lines incised in them representing quantities of goods. One of these postal riders was Israel Bissell , one of the riders commissioned to alert the colonies that the British troops were moving in the early stages of the American War for Independence. The city had to provide sidewalks and crosswalks, ensure that streets were named and lit, and assign numbers to houses. A second train, the Tom Thumb, became the first steam-powered locomotive to be used for delivery in 1830. The loss on second-class mail matter has been increasing for many years until it now amounts to more than $64,000,000. First day of scheduled airmail service, Belmont Park, New York, 1918 Courtesy Library of Congress In the more than two centuries since Benjamin Franklin was appointed our first Postmaster General in 1775, the Postal Service™ has grown and changed with America, boldly embracing new technologies to better serve a growing population. The history of postal systems, a mail or courier service to pass messages from one person in one place to another person in another place, starts with the invention of writing and may well have been one of the reasons writing was invented. 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