Submarine Mail.
In 1938, during the Spanish Civil War, normal communications between the Balearic Islands and the Spanish mainland were disrupted by Nationalist warships. The Republicans maintained a mail service by submarine and produced a set of six stamps and one souvenir sheet.
Germany also delievered mail with submarines between 1872 and 1945, mainly for military mail.
Pigeon Mail.
Pigeon post of Paris[edit]
The pigeon post which was in operation while Paris was besieged during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 is probably the most famous. Barely six weeks after the outbreak of hostilities, the Emperor Napoleon III and the French Army of Châlons surrendered at Sedan on 2 September 1870. There were two immediate consequences: the fall of the Second Empire and the swift Prussian advance on Paris. As had been expected, the normal channels of communication into and out of Paris were interrupted during the four-and-a-half months of the siege, and, indeed, it was not until the middle of February 1871 that the Prussians relaxed their control of the postal and telegraph services. With the encirclement of the city on 18 September, the last overhead telegraph wires were cut on the morning of 19 September, and the secret telegraph cable in the bed of the Seine was located and cut on 27 September. Although a number of postmen succeeded in passing through the Prussian lines in the earliest days of the siege, others were captured and shot, and there is no proof of any post, certainly after October, reaching Paris from the outside, apart from private letters carried by unofficial individuals. For an assured communication into Paris, the only successful method was by the time-honoured carrier-pigeon, and thousands of messages, official and private, were thus taken into the besieged city.
Railway mail.
George B. Armstrong, manager of the Chicago Post Office, is generally credited with being the founder of the concept of en route mail sorting aboard trains which became the Railway Mail Service. Mail had been carried in locked pouches aboard trains prior to Armstrong's involvement with the system, but there had been no organized system of sorting mail en route, to have mail prepared for delivery when the mail pouches reached their destination city.[1]
In response to Armstrong's request to experiment with the concept, the first railway post office (RPO) began operating on the Chicago and North Western Railway between Chicago and Clinton, Iowa, on August 28, 1864.[1] The concept was quickly seen as successful, and was expanded to other railroads operating out of Chicago, including the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, Chicago and Rock Island, Pennsylvania and the Erie.
Pony Express Mail.
George B. Armstrong, manager of the Chicago Post Office, is generally credited with being the founder of the concept of en route mail sorting aboard trains which became the Railway Mail Service. Mail had been carried in locked pouches aboard trains prior to Armstrong's involvement with the system, but there had been no organized system of sorting mail en route, to have mail prepared for delivery when the mail pouches reached their destination city.[1]
In response to Armstrong's request to experiment with the concept, the first railway post office (RPO) began operating on the Chicago and North Western Railway between Chicago and Clinton, Iowa, on August 28, 1864.[1] The concept was quickly seen as successful, and was expanded to other railroads operating out of Chicago, including the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, Chicago and Rock Island, Pennsylvania and the Erie.
Dogs Sled mail.
Delivering the mail to Alaska has always presented a formidable challenge to the U.S. Postal Service. Letters, parcels, and supplies from the “Lower 48 states” often took weeks or months to reach their destinations. Mail dog teams varied in size, with eight to ten dogs the most common number for pulling a sled. Typical of the dog teams that have carried Alaska’s mail is the string of Malamutes shown on the vintage color postcard, “Alaska Dog Team.” The dogs are working with a light racing sled. On a mail run, they would haul a heavier, longer sled.
Reindeer Mail
From around 1899 reindeer were used to deliver mail in Alaska for the U.S. postal service. The first route was established by Sheldon Jackson and ran from St. Michael to Kotzebue, with another managed by William Kjellmann going between Unalakleet and Nome. Distances of 30–50 miles were covered by the service, with the reindeer carrying up to 300 pounds (140 kg) of mail.[7]
Pneumatic Mail
Pneumatic tubes (or capsule pipelines; also known as Pneumatic Tube Transport or PTT) are systems that propel cylindrical containers through a network of tubes by compressed air or by partial vacuum. They are used for transporting solid objects, as opposed to conventional pipelines, which transport fluids. Pneumatic tube networks gained acceptance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for offices that needed to transport small, urgent packages (such as mail, paperwork, or money) over relatively short distances (within a building, or, at most within a city). Some installations grew to great complexity, but were mostly superseded. In some settings, such as hospitals, they remain widespread and have been further extended and developed in recent decades.[1]
Pneumatic post stations usually connect post offices, stock exchanges, banks and ministries. Italy was the only country to issue postage stamps (between 1913 and 1966) specifically for pneumatic post. Austria, France, and Germany issued postal stationery for pneumatic use. Italy was the only country that issued stamps specifically for Pneumatic mail.6
Even more dramatic improvements were made by John Palmer at the British Post Office. The postal delivery service in Britain had existed in the same form for about 150 years—from its introduction in 1635, mounted carriers had ridden between "posts" where the postmaster would remove the letters for the local area before handing the remaining letters and any additions to the next rider. The riders were frequent targets for robbers, and the system was inefficient.[9]
Innovation and aircraft and delivering the mail have gone hand-in-hand since the first use of air travel to advance the mail. No more interesting example of this can be found than with the development of catapult mail. Prior to the advance of aviation to a point of reliable transatlantic travel, the North German Lloyd Line founded a mixed mode mail service. North German Lloyd Line outfitted two ships, the Bremen and the Europa, with airplanes and catapult equipment for transatlantic voyages. When the ship approached the aircraft's range of the destination shore, the airplane was catapulted off the ship and the plane would fly the remaining distance with the mail. For the extra postage fee, 1 or 2 days would be cut from the delivery time for the transatlantic mail service. The service operated between May and October, due to the harse winter weather which made the program impracticle during the winter months. The service ran from the test period in 1929 and regularly operation in the summers of 1930 through 1936. With the advance of aviation, transatlantic flights made the catapult mail system unnecessary, but for a period of time it was a successful application of innovation in delivering the mail.
Space Mail.
Space Shuttle Challenger (NASA Orbiter Vehicle Designation: OV-099) was the second orbiter of NASA's space shuttle program to be put into service following Columbia. The shuttle was built by Rockwell International's Space Transportation Systems Division in Downey, California. Its maiden flight, STS-6, started on April 4, 1983. NASA Accepted covers from collectors that where carried on the maiden flight.
Balloon mail refers to the transport of mail (usually for weight reasons in the form of a postcard) carrying the name of the sender by means of an unguided hydrogen or helium filled balloon. Since the balloon is not controllable, the delivery of a balloon mail is left to good fortune; often the balloon and postcard are lost. A found balloon should be returned to the sender (by conventional post) with an indication of the discovery site, so that the sender can determine how far their balloon flew. Frequently balloon mail is sent as part of a balloon competition.
The address side of a balloon post card shown here from the 1870 siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. Also there is a cover flown by ballon in Poland.
A Zeppelin was a type of rigid airship named after the German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin who pioneered rigid airship development at the beginning of the 20th century. Zeppelin's ideas were first formulated in 1874[1] and developed in detail in 1893.[2] They were patented in Germany in 1895 and in the United States in 1899.[3] After the outstanding success of the Zeppelin design, the word zeppelin came to be commonly used to refer to all rigid airships. Zeppelins were first flown commercially in 1910 by Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-AG (DELAG), the world's first airline in revenue service. By mid-1914, DELAG had carried over 10,000 fare-paying passengers on over 1,500 flights. During World War I the German military made extensive use of Zeppelins as bo
The defeat of Germany in 1918 temporarily slowed down the airship business. Although DELAG established a scheduled daily service between Berlin, Munich, and Friedrichshafen in 1919, the airships built for this service eventually had to be surrendered under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which also prohibited Germany from building large airships. An exception was made allowing the construction of one airship for the US Navy, which saved the company from extinction. In 1926 the restrictions on airship construction were lifted and with the aid of donations from the public work was started on the construction of LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin. This revived the company's fortunes, and during the 1930s the airships Graf Zeppelin and the larger LZ 129 Hindenburg operated regular transatlantic flights from Germany to North America and Brazil. The Art Deco spire of the Empire State Building was originally designed to serve as a mooring mast for Zeppelins and other airships, though it was found that high winds made this impossible, and the plan was abandoned.[5] The Hindenburg disaster in 1937, along with political and economic issues, hastened the demise of the Zeppelins.
