In principle, a postal service can be public or private. Governments
frequently place restrictions on private postal delivery systems. Since the
mid-19th century, national postal systems have been established as government
monopolies with a fee on the article prepaid, frequently in the form of sticky
stamps. In general, government monopolies only extend parcel (non-mail)
delivery to courier services, which supply express delivery. Postal systems
frequently have functions other than sending letters. In some countries, the
postal system also has some power over telephone and telegraph. In others,
postal systems allow for handling applications for passports and saving
accounts.
With the invention of writing, 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 and may well have been one of the reasons writing was
invented.
Writing as a Commercial Enterprise
At least 9,500 years ago, in Mesopotamia the start of writing occurs and
it involved the use of clay tokens, blobs of baked clay which had lines or dots
incised in them representing quantities of goods. A courier might bring tokens
to a seller for so many jars of olive oil, or so many bushels of grain. Think
of it like a Bronze Age bill of lading.
The Uruk-period 3500–3100 BCE, Mesopotamian trade network had ballooned
and they wrapped their clay tokens in thin sheets of clay and they were then
baked. These Mesopotamian envelopes called bullae. They were intended to deter fraud, so that
the seller could be certain that the correct amount of goods would get to the
buyer. In time the tokens were done away with and a tablet with markings was
used—and then writing really took off.
Postal System
The first documented use of a postal system, designated couriers who
were trusted to transport messages—occurred in about 2400 BCE in Egypt when
Pharaohs used couriers to send out decrees throughout the territory of the
state. The earliest surviving piece of mail is also Egyptian, recovered from
the Oxyrhynchus papyri cache which dates back to 255 BCE.
The same type of courier service was likely used to manage taxes and
keep up to date on far-flung reaches of most empires, such as the Persian
empire in the Han dynasty in China (306 BCE–221 CE), the Fertile Crescent
(500–220 BCE), the Islamic Empire (622–1923 CE) in Arabia, the Inca empire in
Peru (1250–1550 CE), and the Mughal empire in India (1650–1857 CE). In addition,
there were doubtlessly state-sponsored messages transported along the Silk
Road, between traders in different empires, probably since its founding in the
3rd century BCE.
The first envelopes protecting such messages from prying eyes were made
of cloth, vegetable parts or , animal skins. In China, paper envelopes were
developed where paper was invented in the 2nd century BCE. Paper envelopes were used to store gifts of money known as chihpoh.
The Birth of Modern Mail Systems
Frenchman Jean-Jacques Renouard de Villayer (1607–1691) in 1653 in
Paris established a postal system. He set up mailboxes. And if they used the
postage pre-paid envelopes that he sold, he delivered any letters placed in
them. When a devious person decided to put live mice in the mailboxes scaring
away his customers, De Valayer's business did not last long.
Rowland Hill (1795–1879), a schoolmaster from England, invented the
adhesive postage stamp in 1837. The first postage stamp system in the world was
issued through his efforts, in England in 1840. Rather than size Hill created
the first uniform postage rates that were based on weight. Hill's stamps made
the prepayment of postage both practical and possible.
In 1874, the Universal Postal Union was established. Today it includes
192 member countries and sets the rules for international mail exchanges.
History of The United States Postal Office
The Postal Service of the United States is an independent agency of the U.S.
federal government. And it has been responsible for providing postal services
in the U.S. since its start in 1775. It is one of the few government agencies
definitely authorized by the U.S. Constitution. Benjamin Franklin, founding
father was appointed the first postmaster general.
First Mail Order Catalog
In 1872, Aaron Montgomery Ward (1843–1913) distributed the first mail
order catalog by selling goods primarily to rural farmers who had difficulty
making it out to the big cities for commerce. With only $2,400, Ward started
his Chicago-based business. The first catalog was with a single 8- by 12-inch
sheet of paper with a price list showing the merchandise for sale with ordering
directions. The catalogs then enlarged into illustrated books. The first
Montgomery Ward retail store opened in 1926 in Plymouth in Indiana. The company
was re-launched in 2004, as an e-commerce business.
The First Automatic Postal Sorter
In 1957 Maurice Levy, a Canadian electronics scientist found an automatic postal sorter that could handle 200,000 letters an hour.
The Canadian Post Office Department had commissioned Levy to supervise
and design the building of a new, electronic, computer-controlled, automatic
mail sortation system for Canada. in 1953, a hand-made model sorter was tested
at postal headquarters in Ottawa. It worked, and a sortation and prototype
coding machine, capable of processing all of the mail then generated by the
City of Ottawa, was built in 1956 by Canadian manufacturers. With a missort
factor of less than one letter in 10,000, it could process mail at a rate of
30,000 letters per hour.
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