Why don't we use Rockets to Send Mail Anymore?

back out and remove the letter. And one day she forgets to do this, and she just assumed the postal worker would get it and throw it away. But a few weeks later they go out to the mailbox and there was a letter with the return address on it from MO. And the letter read, I'm in Doggie Heaven, I play all day, I'm happy, thank you for being my friend. I love you, Luke. That's pretty screat Yeah. And and here's the thing. So anywhere I've lived, the mail carrier has been one of the nicest people in

the neighborhood. I mean, we chat with ours any time we see him. And they're not only so many more good stories about heartwarming moments like this, but they're just so many fascinating stories in the history of the US Postal Service. So that's what we're diving into today. Yea, hey there, podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangesh Ticketer and on the other side of the

soundproof glass the man who always delivers, Tristan McNeil. And on today's show, we're shining the spotlight on one of the great unsung heroes of our society, and that's the US Postal Service. Of course, everybody is aware of the USPS, but many of us tend to take its services for granted, and you know, not really think about the ridiculous amount of planning and work that goes into processing and delivering more than half a billion pieces of mail a day.

In fact, the only time we devote much thought to the postal Service at all this when we need something from it, when something's gone wrong, and we want to blow off steam by griping about it. So today we're trying to break that bad habit by sharing some of the most interesting pieces of postal history, as well as some of the craziest stories to ever make it out of the mailbag, definitely, and to make sure we don't miss any of the good stuff, we'll be talking to

the keeper of postal history or itself, Nancy Pope. Nancy Post the top historian at the National Postal Museum. So we'll talk to her about what it takes to be a postal historian and find out what she considers to be the most interesting pieces of postal office history. All right, So I want to start with one of the things that really stood out to me while doing our research, and that's the immense scope of the Postal Services operations. I mean, we're talking about the largest retail network in

the nation. So there were thirty one thousand active US post offices and just to put that in perspective, that's that's more than all the domestic McDonald's, Starbucks and Walmart's combined. And to staff all those locations and handle the deliveries between them, the Postal Service employees over half a million people and maintains a lead of two hundred and twenty seven thousand vehicles. That's one of the largest civilian fleets in the world. The US Postal Service is a gargantuan

NonStop delivery machine. Yeah, and the scope of what all that manpower and tech can achieve is equally impressive. So the USPS is actually responsible for the delivery of nearly half the mail volume in the entire world. That's but I think the most amazing thing about the whole crazy operation is that for almost fifty years now, it's cost taxpayers virtually nothing. There on a whole lot of government departments or agencies you can say that about it is impressive.

But I notice you said costs virtually nothing for taxpayers. And I always wondered whether like things like the postage sales and products and all their special services like express mail, you know, covered those costs. So are you saying it actually does receive some government funding though? Well, you're definitely right that stamp sales and stuff like that pays for the agency's operating costs, but they do receive less than

one percent of their budget from the govern mint. According to PolitiFact, Congress gives the Postal Service a hundred million dollars a year to compensate the agency for providing freemailing privileges to blind people and overseas voters. Okay, well, that that's pretty interesting, and it's actually a pretty good return on on what I would say overall as a small investment from each taxpayer. And and honestly that that's always been the case with mail delivery in America, even before

the US became a country, before became country. So how is that? Well, during the Second Continental Congress in seventeen seventy five, this is a year before the colonies would declare their independence from England, the delegates established this postal system and and appointed Ben Franklin as the first Postmaster General. And the great thing about that is that Franklin's appointment

was this act of rebellion in itself. Like he previously served as the postmaster General and the colonies for the British Royal Mail system, but he'd been dismissed because of his involvement in the Revolution. So he was actually appointed as the first postmaster General twice. It's a good thing we rehired and from our side, because you know, Franklin really helped establish the whole basis of the postal system

as we know it today. He surveyed thousands of miles of post roads and made adjustments so that routes would be more efficient. He also instituted the idea of having postal riders traveled day and night. They'd use landers to light the way for their horses, and all these changes greatly improved the speed of the mail by some estimates, cutting delivery times in half. That's crazy. So I had no idea that the postal riders were around the clock.

And I guess that mentality is the same one that gives it, like the post office create about not a snow nor rain. Yeah, there's the whole thing that people always talk about that, you know that neither snow nor rain or heat or gloom YadA, YadA, YadA. But actually it's pretty interesting. There's no such thing as a postman's creed.

I was looking at this and and and so people always associate that phrase with the postal Service because it's engraved on the outside of a famous post office in New York, But there's really no official motto for the USPS. In fact, the phrase isn't even original to our own postal system. It's actually a translation of the Greek historian Herodotus and his description of the ancient Persian male courier.

So apparently they did all of this through neither heat nor rain or whatever it was, and all that gloom. But yeah, I mean, I guess that's a bit of a letdown, but it does feel strange that we expect our electric bills to be delivered during blizzards. I think they've actually done a pretty decent job of meeting these, you know, admittedly high expectations. Because there's one other thing that amazed me while doing the research, and that's just

how versatile an organization the USPS is. So it's grown right along with the country for hundreds of years, and it's had to evolve the fifth expanding needs of the public. Yeah, so well, one of the first major transitions took place back in eightee, when the USPS first started delivering mail by train, and so prior to that most deliveries have been made on horseback or by horse drawn wagon. And

when the mail volume increased, that's when things changed. But the burgeoning railroad, with its hubs in major cities, that all allowed the mail to be delivered up and down the East coast, and the tech changes only increased from there. So like cars and trucks arrived on the mail scene in and airplanes soon followed suit in nineteen eleven, I believe, yeah, and you know, you can still see that kind of versatility today. According to the Postal Service, they use every

transportation method available to them while making their rounds. I was looking at a list of the different ways they deliver mail that include planes, trains, trucks, cars, boats, ferries, helicopters, subways, float planes, hovercraft, mules, bicycles, and of course feat I feel like I should be stunned by hovercrafts, but it's really mules that's confusing to me. Yeah, it's still on

the list. There's actually one mail by mule route left in the US, and it's this eight mile trail that leads down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon where the Havasupai tribe. They've lived there for over eight hundred years, and so six days a week the mule train carries about four thousand pounds of male food supplies and even for Richard down these steep walls of the canyon. I was trying to look to see how long this took.

It takes about three hours for the team to get down there, but it's a five hour trip coming back up and it happened six days a week. That's so crazy, and it's amazing that the mail really does go everywhere. But but you know, there's one delivery method that I'm

kind of bummed is missing from the current list. Pneumatic tubes. Right, So, before mail trucks took to the streets, the six major cities I've got these written downs as at Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, Brooklyn, New York, and Chicago, they all made use of underground networks of pressurized air tubes to deliver their mail. And at the system's peak in nineteen the city's had a combined total of over fifty six miles of pneumatic tubes,

all zigzagging beneath the surface. And while these tube systems start popping up in the U S during the eighteen nineties, it's actually been used in Europe for almost forty years by that point. Apparently there were first put to use in stock exchanges so that traders could communicate messages to buy or sell stocks, and you know, a faster rate than telegraph, and it makes sense as a way to get messages across and the noumatic tubes or what the

banks use, and those are really fast. But you know, we're talking about a hundred and twenty plus years ago, so were they actually fast in the eight nineties. Yeah. The weird thing is they were pretty fast, Like the male tubes in the U s could move a canister holding up to six hundred letters an average speed of thirty five miles per hour. Yeah. So as one example, uh and their stories of postal workers who worked the

tubes that they were known as rocketeers. But these rocketeers in downtown New York City actually ordered sandwiches from this deli up in the Bronx and apparently they'd received their orders via pneumatic tube within twenty minutes. I want to order a sandwich by Nematic. That is pretty awesome, although I'm guessing ordering lunch wasn't officially sanctioned for the use of the tubes. But so, did you come across any other weird stuff that was sent by these tubes? Definitely so.

According to an article and written by Robert Cohen for the USPS website, there was this bizar our opening ceremony where the first tubes were installed at the General post Office in New York City and the higher ups they're basically wanted to show the employees what their new toy could do. So the very first male canister to travel the tubes. It contained a Bible, a flag, and a copy of the Constitution, which is super patriotic. And the second contained this imitation peach in honor of a Senator

Chauncey Deput. Apparently he was fondly known as the Peach. Even more patriotic. And the third carrier is the weirdest. It had a black cat inet a black Oh wow, that's pretty weird. And as much as I dislike cats, I really hate the idea of somebody stuffing a cat into a tube. Was the ket Okay? Yeah, well, well the cat was fine. It was a little dazed according to witnesses, but otherwise all right. And sadly though, this was just the first of many animals to be shot

around New York City through a pressurized tube. So Kenneth Stewart. He's the author of a Pneumatic Male Tubes and Operation of Automatic Railroads. He says that plenty of other animals made the journey to including dogs and mice and roosters, guinea pigs, monkeys, even some goldfish. Yeah, and in one of those cases it actually involved sending a sick cat to the animal hospital, so it was a good use. But the rest were mostly just examples of postal workers

showing off. I said, it's not this Postal Services proudest moment, but but I actually don't get it. So animal cruelty aside. I mean, it sounds like the tubes worked pretty well in these sprawling city so so why don't we see New Yorkers and others still using them? Yes, there's actually a few reasons. One was that the mail volumes kept increasing and it was simply too much for the tubes to handle, especially considering the systems pipes were only between

two and eight inches wide. Oh my god, that poor cat. I can't about that. Yeah, But the main reason is that most of the tube systems were built and owned by private companies and and they merely rented to the Post Office. So, uh, these rental costs just got too high in the long term. And according to Kate Astor, who's the author of the work Anatomy of a City, uh,

let me just find this quote. She wrote, by eighteen the federal government considered the annual rental payments seventeen thousand dollars per mile per annum made by the Post Office to be exorbitant, and they endorsed a new alternative with

greater capacity, the automobile as the delivery method of choice. Yeah, I mean, as sad as it is to see does go away, I guess it, it makes sense and I can't deny that thematic tubes and mule trains they do add this pop of color to the Postal Services history though, Yeah, totally and in fact, well, why don't we get a historian online and see what other weird stories are lurking in the USPS archives? Sounds like a plan. So our guest today has been with the Smithsonian Institution for over

three decades now, which Mango. I'm pretty sure that makes her super smart if I'm not mistaken so, but more importantly for today's episode, she's been curating exhibits at the National Postal Museum since it opened in nineteen. She's now the head curator of the history department there. Nancy Pope, welcome to Part time Genius. Thank you, it's good to

be here. So, Nancy, we've had so much fun digging into the history of the Postal Service, and we've talked about all the things like, you know, delivery by mule and pneumatic tubes and all kinds of stuff. But but do you have a favorite delivery method that's actually no longer being used. I have a favorite method that was

used once. What's that? It's missile mail. On June, the US Navy fired a Regulus one missile off the USS Barbaro, which was floating out in the Atlantic, and they directed it to land at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station at Mayport, Florida. And instead of having a nuclear weapon on board, they had two blue and red metal containers that held three thousand letters. Wow, So so why were they are doing this?

Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield was a man who really wanted to modernize his post office, and he was doing anything and everything he could do to kind of try that, and he was trying a lot of silly things. He thought about missile mail, and he talked to the War Department, and they had their own little idea that they wanted to make sure the Russians knew that we were so good with our missiles that we could direct them to land anywhere we wanted, and they were so useful that

we could use them too. I don't know carry mail. The letter that Summerfield since and was one of the three thousand letters they were actually all the same letters inside the missile. He says that this is just the beginning, but um, he's smarter than that, and I think it was a pr stunt from beginning to end for both

the war and the post Office department. Actually, one of the other examples I saw was the railway mail crane, which doesn't seem that exciting at first, but can you explain how that worked in terms of the trains passing through towns pretty quickly. In the days of railway mail.

Most of the times the trains would actually stop and exchange to the mail at a train station, but they couldn't stop at every single one, you know, most trains were not milk runs, and so to exchange the mail at some of these towns, they had to figure out a way to get the mail bag off and a mail bag onto the train while the train was moving, And they came up with these cranes, and the postmaster would go up and hook a mail bag, a leather mail bag to this crane, so it was passing at

top and bottom stretched out so it was very tight. And then the train would come along and the clerk on the train would be looking out his door and he had a long iron crane that was attached to the door, and he'd swing that out. And you could never swing it out too early because then you knocked

the telephone poles down. But you had to watch out and be very very careful until you saw the cranes and you slung your iron crane up and the crane would actually grab the mail bag and you would pull the crane back in, and while you're doing this, you would kick the mail bag full of mails for that station off the train. So you do it all of this at once, and you had to kick really hard because if you didn't, it got sucked under the train

and mail bag would explode letters everywhere. And they called that a snowfall. Wow, that's pretty actually sounds like could be pretty dangerous at the same time. But that that's that's very interesting. So I know the main vehicle used by the postal service, this Grunman l LV or the Long Life Vehicle. I read somewhere recently that it gets an average fuel economy of about ten miles a gallon.

If and if that's the case, what are your thoughts on, you know, why that vehicle was chosen and why we haven't seen a move away from that vehicle given how much fuel must be used in a given week. The l l V was selected after a test run. What happened was the Post Office Department UM was tired of just buying their vehicles off the rocks. They said, we have very special needs. We're going to list our needs and then we're going to stay build a vehicle to

those needs. They were put over, you know, horrible ditches. They were put over cobblestones. They had to stop and start, stop and start stops, all the things that are a male vehicle has to do that our regular cars don't. And the LLLV, the grummin l l V, won the test. And because they won that test, that's why they were selected. And they were also selected because they could last twenty

five years. A bigger problem right now is twenty five years has expired or most of that fleet, and the Post Office Department very much wants to get new cars, and they have started bringing in new vehicles um bit by bit, but it's gonna be you know, millions of dollars to replace the total LLV fleets it's left. So let's talk stamps for a second. Are there any historical figures you feel are overdue for a recognition on the stamp. I would think Arthur Summerhills should be on a stamp

if he hasn't been yet. And that was the postmaster general who did the missile mail, just because he came up with the whole concept of modernizing the post office department in the fifties, because it had been stuck in the thirties with no money because of the depression in the forties, with no money because of World War Two. So by the fifties they were using thirty year old trucks that were barely being held together by you know, spit and glue. Uh, they're mechan there's systems of moving

the mail inside a post office were just antiquated. Everything was old and i'm stupid and rotten and nothing was working well. And he came in and basically convinced Congress to give him a lot of money to modernize things, and he kick started a whole lot of stuff in the post office department. Got automation going, computerized sorting systems, the zip code system, all of that would have never exists if it wasn't for Summerfield. So, yeah, get him

lot of stamp. Yeah, Well, we'll start the petition. Yeah, yeah, Well, for all of our listeners that are visiting the Smithsonian Museums anytime in the near future, we hope you'll check out the National Postal Museum. It is a fascinating place to visit. But Nancy, thanks so much for joining us on part Time Genius. That was my pleasure. You're listening to part Time Genius, and we're talking about the fascinating

evolution of the US Postal Service. So well, we've mentioned a few times now that an increase in mail volume was the main reason for a bunch of the mail system's major changes, Like it's the reason we switched from horses to carriages and then from tubes to trucks. And it's also why the number of post offices bloon from you know, just seventy five way back in sev over

twenty eight thousand in eighteen sixty. And in fact, this ever increasing mail volume became the accepted status quo for over two hundred years, no matter what changes came in the form of new transportation styles or competing communication systems like telegraphs or telephones or radios or TVs. Like the one truth for the postal service was that mail volume just continued to go up and up. But all of that changed in two thousand seven, when for the first

time in history, mail started to decline. Yeah, and and that was the year that the effects of the Internet really started to catch up to them. And and ever since then, the net mail volume flowing through the system is decreased every single year. And it's a big problem for the agency, especially being a self funded agency, because any decrease in mail is a decrease in revenue exactly. And at the same time, the public still expects to receive mail every day of the week at any address

in the country. This has led to the postal Service having to increase its number of delivery points, which opposites operating costs even as profits steadily shrink. It's it's you know, it's not all gloom and doom, though I was. I was reading this article on upworthy that proposed an interesting solution. You know. They were looking at their their financial woes and trying to come up with things to do, and there's the idea for post offices to start offering financial services,

things like check cashing and payday loans. It's roughly thirty five million American households rely on alternative financial services like that instead of traditional banking, and since they currently have to go through private institutions, you know, for these different kinds of services, it can wind up cost way more money than it should. In fact, according to a report released by the USPS, Americans spend the total of about eighty nine billion dollars on interest and fees from these

alternative financial services. This was from back in two thousand twelve, which is crazy, right, it really is. But but see, if post offices were allowed to compete in that market, they could undercut the competition, save millions for Americans and secure this nice new revenue stream in the process. At least that's the hope, and and it seems like a win win and and not that far fetched the concept. I mean, post offices already offer some banking services like

selling money orders and cashing treasury checks. Yeah, you know, really the main thing preventing this from happening, it would be the banks themselves. They have an awful lot of clout and government and of course they don't like the idea of a public institution muscling into their territory. But who knows. I mean, if the situation continues to worsen for the USPS, those voices of opposition might cease to

carry as much sway. Yeah, and the good news is that history is on the postal services side, so it's faced some any dire challenges in the past, and it's always smuddled through. I mean, if you need any evidence of the resilience of the USPS, you just have to look at zip codes. That's a good point. And there's definitely an aspect of mail we take for granted. So so actually I think we should spend a little time talking about zip codes, sure, so we can give a

little background on it. For starters. Zip codes are a much more recent innovation than you'd guess. Although they were first developed as this time saving tool to help understaff post offices, and this was during World War Two, they weren't actually putting to use until twenty years later in ninete. And this was a time before the Postal Service was self funding. It's still received the bulk of its funds from Congress, but in the mid sixties Congress wasn't supplying

enough cash to keep up with the post war mail boom. Yeah, and post offices wanted new sorting machines so they could finally automate the process instead of continuing to wage this really unwinnable war that was hand sorting at the time. But Congress thought they were making a big deal out of nothing. I mean, after all, they had handled mail the old fashioned way for over a century at this point, so as they saw, you know, why fix what isn't broken,

except it was broken. I mean. The proof finally came in October of nineteen sixty six, and that's the month when a combination of election mailings and holiday season advertisements they totally clogged the system. It was like a mail fat burg. And then the whole thing came to a staff like the Chicago Post Office, which was the largest in the country at the time, halted mail delivery for a full three weeks while they tried to make sense of this volume and and all these letters and parcels

that needed to be sorted. I mean, the whole thing led Congress back to the move to automation, And at the center of it all was this old zip code idea, which was finally taken off the shelf and put into action.

And with the new machinery and the advent of zip codes, postal workers were able to sort up to thirty thousand letters an hour, which was nearly ten times as many as a single worker could sort by hand in the same amount of time, which I find almost as baffling that a single worker was previously able to sort three thousand. I know, us unbelievable, but obviously this was a huge,

huge improvement. But I do think we should take a second to explain the role ZIP codes played in that process, because, you know, as often as we're exposed the ZIP codes, I feel like most of us don't really know that much about them, or that they're actually an acronym. ZIP stands for Zoning Improvement Plan. Yeah, and and the name

really does say at all. So the numbers were part of the plan to improve the way that mail was sorted by address, and a ZIP code specified which region or zone of the country to which a piece of mail should be sent. And instead of hand sorting letters by city address, which obviously took a good deal of time in some cases and required, you know, knowledge of geography, machines were able to electronically scan the short string of

numbers and sort the mail using that coded information. Yeah, and that's another thing that I think most of us don't really understand is what exactly those five numbers means. So I'll just explain that. So, the first digit represents the region where the address is located. So for the purposes of zip codes, the country split into ten zones. You start on the East coast, and then you increase that number as you move across to the west coast.

So you know, Maine and New York have zip codes that start with zero and one, Maryland's a two, and then you go all the way across the country. You get to California and Washington and they begin with the

number nine. That's pretty awesome. And and I'm guessing the other four digits specify the location of an address even further Yep, they get even more specific, so that the second two digits correspond to a smaller area of the country and and the central postal facility that services that region, and then the final two digits signify the actual local

post office that delivers to that given address. But to me, the best part of it was that the USPS had this advertising campaign they launched in the sixties to raise awareness of the new system. Oh that's so, there was this little jingle used to promote it or something like that. Yeah, and that's underselling it a bit. So it was actually this fifteen minute musical p s A performed by none other than the Swinging Six Swinging I love that. It

was fifteen minutes. My god, I know. And and there's no way to do this thing justice by talking about it. You really need to YouTube it. But the short of it is that the Postal Service financed this incredibly campy video as a means of like selling the public on the importance of ZIP codes and how it was going to make everything speedier and more efficient. And they also created this new cartoon mascot named Mr Zip and that

really helped drive home the point as well. I remember Mr Zip, that creepy little male man stick figured And they kind of went all out with this campaign. I mean, they really had no faith in the American public to write these five extra digits to they apparently not. But Mr Zip in the Swinging Six like, they really caught on and and Mr Zip became something of a pop culture icon in his own right. He appeared on magazines and mail trucks and television and radio ads and even

on things like lunch boxes. But but of course, the surest sign of mr Zip's success was that by seventy which was really just seven years after the start of the campaign, zip code use had risen to let me find these numbers eighty six percent nationwide, and by seventy nine it had climbed to nine. I mean, those are pretty solid results, and it does make you feel for mr Zip a little bit. I mean, he seems that

played a pretty big role in all of this. Kind of the uh I don't know, like the smokey bear of the postal service, but you don't find him anywhere these days. I know he's hanging out with Clippy for Microsoft, but I feel like you're preaching to acquire here. You know what's weird, though, is that the USPS actually did try out one other mascot before mr Zip and it's kind of a weird story. But before we get into it,

let's break for a quiz. Okay man goes So, when we put out a call for listeners to let us know if they wanted to come on and play a quiz, one of them wrote in and it's actually a mail carrier, which is perfect for today's episode. I know, it's so awesome, alright, so, Sarah Hofferbert, welcome to Part Time Genius. Hi, thank you so much, Sarah. Where are you you delivering mail today?

I'm in Rochester, New York today? Okay, all right, I assume that's where you deliver mail every day around the city, different places yet, okay? And how long have you been a and and his mail carrier? The correct term? What is the official title? My my My job title is that I'm a letter carrier, but mail carriers just just fine? Okay? And how long have you been doing this? About four years? Okay?

All right, Well, thank you for writing in. We're We're glad you're a regular listener of Part Time Genius, and so we are going to put you to the test. Mango. What is our quiz called today? It's called going Postal and it's a true false quiz. If you know everything about the post office is history, it should be pretty easy, alright. You know every single thing about the history of the post office. There's nothing I don't know. All right, confidence,

here we go. We're gonna read you a statement and all you need to do is tell us whether it's true or false. You ready to go? Yes? Okay? Question number one, the first post office in Colonial America was in a bar. That is true. Exactly, you're right. So it was set up in sixteen thirty nine and operated out of the Boston home in tavern of Richard Fairbanks, where he liked to serve glasses of strong water. Excellent, All right, she has one for one, okay, Sarah. Question

number two. In Luxembourg, the post office trained Saint Bernard's to carry letters to homes, but the system only lasted a month thanks to the city's squirrel population. That sounds like something I would want to be true, But yeah, you're right. I mean, it's not a totally crazy idea, because Belgium did try delivering mail by cats for a little bit that that was a total disaster. Okay, okay, so far, Sarah, you're delivering this is great. Question number three.

In Victorian London, mail was delivered twelve times a day. That is also true. She's amazing at this. Yeah, mail was treated more like instant messenger back then, when people actually like sent immediate sponsors back and they get upset if you didn't respond. Okay, alright, two left, She's three for three so far. Question number four. When Harry Winston donated the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian in nineteen It was actually sent via US mail. True or faults. I

want to say that's true. It is true. So they sent it by first class mail for just two dollars and forty four cents and the Smithsonian still has the packaging. Wow, and how much was that worth? Three million dollars? Any a little bit of insurance on that? That is incredible. All right, we are four for four. Coming up with the last question. Let's see if Sarah can score perfect.

Let's see all right, question number five. Ben Franklin was so obsessed with yams as a tasty snack that in the winter he insisted that every mail carrier received a warm, grilled yam before servicing their route through or faults. That would be delicious in the winter. But I want to say that's false. That's amazing. You an incredible five for five. Yeah. I wanted that one to be true so much. But mango. But alright, so Sarah went an incredible five for five.

What does she want today? So? Uh, Sarah actually gets an official part time genius Certificate of Genius, which we're we're just making and she's gonna be the first recipient all right, we will send that to you. Yeah, we will send that to you and the male safe travels on your route today. And thanks again for joining us, Thank you for having me. Alright, Mango, So you were talking about this other postal mascot before the break, So,

so what's weird about it? Well, for for starters, the mascot was a dog, which is a surprising choice for postal workers given the history between the two. All Right, well, I know you're usually the tangent person, but I feel like I want to go on one here as well, because I was actually kind of curious about the deal with dogs and postal workers, so I was looking into it a little bit, and and actually this psychology of having their turf invaded and understanding why they always go

after the postal workers. So the situations made way worse by the fact that the mail carriers keep coming day in and day out, and and that's something I had not really thought about before. So it reinforces the idea that the dog needs to defend its territory. And you know, because the carriers do eventually walk away from the home, the dog feels rewarded and it's likely to repeat that

same behavior next time. It's basically the definition of a vicious cycle, and a major emphasis on the vicious part here because actually I was looking at the numbers. According to the USPS, more than six thousand of its mail carriers are attacked by dogs each man. That's terrible, and I'm actually glad I get to talk about this mascot now. It's it's a nice throwback to these days when dogs

and postal workers were actually friends. But uh, at least that was the case with this particular dog named Ony that was the actual dog. Is that this is a real dog? Owny? Yeah, so only was a stray mutt

who started joining a mail clerk on his morning walk. Uh. This was in Albany, New York, way back in and this morning routine gradually led to any hanging out at the office during the day, and he became friends with other postal clerks, and he also developed this strange affinity for the texture of mail bags, both the texture and

the smell. And once his clerk pal moved away, the other mail clerks took him in and from there only started following his beloved mail bags onto mail wagons and trains, and he rode with the bags in the post office train cars traveling all over the country and later all over the world, and all these railroad workers were cool with some random dog just traveling around with him. Yeah, apparently they loved Onny. So train wrecks were really common at the time, but no train ever crashed with one

on board. And he kind of became this good luck charm for the railway mail clerks and this unofficial mascot whose many travels were marked by people placing medals and tags on his collar. That's really sweet. But so did you get to keep one of the mail bags when he retired? No, so that this story actually has kind of a sad ending. So Oney never made it to retirement. In June, only boarded a mail train for Toledo, Ohio.

And while only was making his rounds and you know, greeting all these people in Toledo, one postal clerk showed him do a newspaper reporter and the full details have never been investigated, but supposedly only became ill tempered and he was shot on June. God MANO, that really took a turn there, I know. But like I said, we don't really know that full details, but we do know

that the mail clerks were totally devastated. They took up this collection and used the money to have only preserved and today visitors to the National Postal Museum in Washington, d C. Can actually see one on display, still wearing his harness and some of his favorite tags. That's pretty neat. Well, I guess that's about as happy of an inning as you can get with a story like that. But honestly, I'm glad to hear they put his remains in the museum instead of just stuffing him in one of those

thematic twos we were talking about earlier. Yeah, I mean only never traveled by two, but there are plenty of animals who make trips by mail even today. You know. I saw that, like, apparently live scorpions are totally fine to mail, and you know, as long as they're to be used for medical or anti venom research. I don't know how you prove that, but that's those are the reasons you can mail them, and they're clearly marked as live scorpions. Also saw that baby alligators are mailable too,

as long as they're under twenty. This all feels totally crazy to me, but but by the way, my my favorite animal by mail story is the one about this guy in Ohio who mailed his pet chameleon to Florida so they could have a warmer place to live. He was worried a little guy wouldn't make it through the cold winter in Ohio, so he slipped the lizard into this pre stamped envelope and mailed it off to the Sunshine State. So did this Did the chameleon make it? Yeah?

The sender had requested that he'd be informed when his pet arrived, and sure enough, Orlando's postmaster obliged. He responded, Uh, let me find this, Dear David. I received your chameleon yesterday and he was immediately released on the post office grounds. Best wishes for a merry Christmas. That's an animal in the mail story. Alright. You know, still as weird as mailing around chameleons and alligators and scorpions as it's it's nothing compared to mailing actual people, which I know we

both saw in our research has actually happened. I know I was hoping this would come off. So there's such a long successful history of people sending themselves and each other through the mail, and as far as we know, the first person to travel by mail was baby James Beagle. He was this eight month old boy whose parents mailed him to his grandmother a few miles away. Eight months old,

I know a baby Graham. And this was just a few weeks after the Postal Service began transporting larger parcels rather than just letters or magazines, so it really didn't take long for someone to try mailing a human. Apparently, the main appeal was that postage was way cheaper than a train ticket. Baby James's travel apparently only cost his parents fifteen cents and stints, though to be fair they did spring for fifty dollars and insured nice the parents

of the year right there. But you're right though, mailing yourself is definitely an inexpensive way to travel. I was reading about this professional javelin thrower from Australia's name was Red Spears, and in nineteen sixty four he went up stranded in England after failing to make the cut for the English Olympic team. He was all set to return home and then his wallet was stolen and so he was left flat broken without any way back to Australia. His solution, I'll seal himself in a small crate and

actually mail himself cash on delivery. So how long was he in there? I think it was like a three day trip and all. And this this includes this particularly toasty layover and Mumbai where you know, his limited provisions and makeshift bathroom slash water bottle. I mean, these things were stretched to their limits on this three day trip. And in the end though, the plan worked and he

made it safely back to Australia. Of course, reporters quickly caught wind of this embarrassing ordeal, but Spears even managed to turn that to his advantage. The airline itself took pity on him forgave his dad. He even went on to co author a book about the experience. It was titled, of course, out of the Box. That's pretty great. But my favorite story of all time of someone shifting himself in a box has to be Henry Box Brown, the slave who mailed himself to freedom. Oh that's a good one. Yeah,

you should tell this story definitely. So in Eine Brown escaped his master's property in Virginia and with the help of some abolitionists, he mailed himself across state lines to the free state of Pennsylvania. It cost him eighty six dollars, which is a little more than today, and the trip lasted a miserable twenty seven hours, but it actually went

off without a hitch. The next day, Brown was successfully delivered to Freedom, and he went on to become a well known entertainer and abolitionist speaker in his later life. And that was all thanks to the U S. Mail System. Man, Well, if that's not a ringing endorsement for the USPS, I'm honestly not sure what is. Yeah, but what do you say we now honor one of our own sacred institutions with a good old fashioned fact. Yeah, I'll start with the story about how a stamp was used to do

some serious trash talking and almost started a war. In the nineteen thirties, Nicaragua's postal service put out a stamp that featured a map of Nicaragua. The stamp also showed Honduras north of Nicaragua's border, but instead of just letting it be, the stamp labeled the territory quote territory in dispute. And this was despite the fact that the territory issues

have been settled thirty years earlier. When the stamps first started arriving with mail and Honduras people started rioting and a mob showed up at the Nicaraguan embassy, and after both countries sent troops to the border, the US and Mexico actually had to interview in just to prevent the war. All right, this is pretty different one. So ever, wonder where the mail goes when it's the term that it cannot be delivered and the postal service doesn't know where

to return it to. It's actually not far at all from where we're sitting right now. This is to the Mail Recovery Center here in Atlanta. So sadly it took on this name in nine when its name was changed from what had been the Dead Letter Office, which I just love so much more. But the MRC then auctions off these items of value, not not individually. They're actually sold as these big groups of things. So there have even been entire tractor trailers of books sold as an example.

That's kind of awesome. So I was looking at some stats on junk mail. The amount of junk mail received by all American households in the US each year is the equivalent of about hundred million trees, and junk mail manufacturing creates the equivalent of three point seven million cars in greenhouse gas emissions. Alright, So, hikers in Nevada and Utah and other areas of these vast landscapes have been

puzzled by these huge concrete arrows on the ground. But if you were to fly over these arrows, you'd actually see that they're part of this cross country path of arrows. So in the nies, Congress approved the creation of a nearly three thousand mile line of the seventy foot long yellow concrete arrows, stretching from New York to San Francisco.

They're about ten miles apart, and the purpose was to give pilots of the time away to navigate safely across the various thirteen stops from coast to coast, which is actually awesome. So until the nineteen sixties, most college students actually mailed their dirty clothes home to mom to wash, and this was until washing machines became more common. It was also expected that mom would send your clean underwear

back with a fresh batch of cookies. I'm kind of hoping my mom's not listening to this, because because I still send my clothes home to mom, I don't want her to know that most people don't do this anymore, but I gotta admit it. That's a great fact. So I'm gonna have to give you this fact off. Congratulations. Now, if we missed any of your favorite postal service facts, you can email us as always part Time Genius at how stuff Works dot com or call seven Fact hot

Line one eight four four pt Genius. It is still seven right, mengo. Okay, that's great. Well, thank you guys so much for listening. Thanks again for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of How Stuff Works and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do the important things we couldn't even begin to understand. Christa McNeil does the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song and does the MIXI mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland does the

exact producer thing. Gabeluesier is our lead researcher, with support from the research Army including Austin Thompson, Nolan Brown and Lucas Adams and Eve. Jeff Cook gets the show to your ears. Good job, Eves. If you like what you heard, we hope you'll subscribe. And if you really really like what you've heard, maybe you could leave a good review for us. Do we do we forget Jason? Jason who