With the development of the Internet, mail has lost its popularity, but not completely – it is still actively used. Somewhere, the Internet is simply lacking or almost nonexistent, and besides, many people value messages written on paper much higher than soulless letters on a monitor screen. Postal services survived the telegraph and telephone, and, therefore, survive the Internet.
In 1984, the longest letter was mailed. He was sent by Alan Foreman. The letter was addressed to his wife and consisted of 1,402,344 words. In 1661, Colonel Henry Bishop, who at that time held the post of General Postmaster of England, invented the postmark. He was so tired of customer complaints about the delay in correspondence that he came to the conclusion that it was necessary to put a date on each letter. The idea quickly spread around the world. 2The United States Postal Service is considered the largest employer worldwide. Thanks to her, 870 thousand people have jobs. Interestingly, it is America’s postal service that processes 46% of the world’s available mail. The world’s first mailboxes appeared on the territory of modern Italy, in Florence. This happened 400 years ago. In those days, such boxes were used to collect anonymous denunciations, which they wrote to scientists and philosophers of the time, they were suspected of heresy. Only in 1952, the British post introduced a ban on the transfer of people. The reason was one Englishman who “checked the mail for strength”, sending everything in a row, including himself. In one minute, approximately 5 million letters go through all the post offices in the world. In the UK, on the island of Guernsey, in the town of St. Peter Port in 1853, the oldest surviving mailbox was installed. Now it is owned by the British Crown.
For the first time, a woman was portrayed on a stamp in 1893. It was a postage stamp of America and it depicted the Queen of Spain, Isabella. In the Pacific country of Vanuatu, there is the only post office in the world located under water. Fun for tourists, but it really works. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was possible to send children by mail to the USA, and this service cost 10 times cheaper than a train ticket. The child was “packed” in a special mail bag, stamped on his clothes, and the parcel delivered to its destination. During the journey, postal couriers looked after the child. In the UK in 1840, stamps first appeared officially. They were called Black Penny. After that, they began to comply with the rule, which stated that the name of the country must be indicated in Latin letters on the stamp. The only country this rule does not apply to is the United Kingdom. This honor was bestowed upon her as a country that, in fact, invented brands. One day, the UK postal service crashed. Interestingly, as a result, a postcard sent on the eve of the Great Depression of 1929 did not reach Wall Street only in 2008, on the eve of another global economic crisis. This is the longest mail delivery in history. Such a hobby as collecting postcards with different pictures takes the third place in popularity around the world. The first two places belong to collecting coins and postage stamps. If you put together all the brochures that Americans daily receive by mail, the resulting paper is enough to warm 250,000 homes, if you use it as fuel. Mail forwarding services in a form known to us first appeared in Britain during the Scarlet and White Roses War, when King Henry VII began to receive regular messages about the movement of his army.
The oldest post office in the world (from the number operating until now) began to operate in 1712, it is located in the city of Sankier in Scotland (see interesting facts about Scotland). It is said that one of Chamberlain’s political opponents, whom he refused to admit, “sent” himself by mail to Chamberlain’s name. The latter found a way out, refusing to receive this “premise”. London post offices still receive letters addressed to Sherlock Holmes, residing at 221B Baker Street. The famous Hollywood actor Jack Nicholson at one time worked as a “reflector” for letters from fans of Tom and Jerry, the heroes of the animated series of the same name. Actor Ryan O’Neill once mailed a live tarantula to journalist Rone Barett, who specializes in rumors about stars. The largest collections of postage stamps in the world belonged to US President Franklin Roosevelt and Indian President Jawaharlal Nehru.
The collection of postcards stored in the Central Museum of Communications named after A.S. Popov in St. Petersburg includes over 3,000,000 postage stamps from all over the world. The largest number of letters was written by his wife Mitsu, the former vice president of the Treasury and the Minister of Construction of Japan, Wichi Noda, from his overseas trips. From July 1961 until the death of his wife in March 1985, Noda sent 1307 letters consisting of 50 thousand characters. These letters were published in 25 volumes on 12,404 pages. Since the mid-19th century, pneumatic mail has spread in many large cities in Europe and America. Post office stations were connected by underground pipes, in which capsules with letters moved by means of compressed or diluted air. Gradually, with the development of new technologies, airmail systems closed. The last of them operated in Prague before the flood of 2002, although they are now engaged in its restoration. In the 17-18 centuries in England there was a position of a royal opener of letters bottles caught in the open sea. Everyone else who opened such bottles on their own was entitled to the death penalty.
