There are certain obvious, every day, common things and knowledge that most of us have never noticed that either never existed or that have completely vanished. There are no 1975 quarters, for instance—the US mint never produced any because they were ramping up production of the bicentennial quarter. Do you even know the location of the closest payphone to your house? Contrary to popular belief, the names of Columbus’ three ships were not the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. And did you know that you can’t send letters by airmail anymore?
Okay, technically, you can still send mail that will travel by air. The United States Postal Service claims that Express Mail and Priority Mail travel by air, but they no longer use the term ‘airmail’ and the old service for private letters is no longer being offered.
Getting an airmail letter meant someone cared, it meant that they wanted their message to get to you as fast as possible, and it meant there was something adventurous about the special journey the letter took. I miss all of that.
When Ben Franklin established America’s postal system, there was only one class of mail and the cost to send a simple letter anywhere in the former colonies was two cents. The British had a sliding scale for postage that depended on how far the letter was to be sent, but Franklin cut those rates as an act of unifying the colonies into a nation. The cost was low, but the service was slow: it might take two weeks for a letter to travel from New York to South Carolina.
As the country grew, the cost of transporting letters across the constantly increasing distances was partially offset by the steady improvements of transportation infrastructure such as roads, canals, and eventually trains. With the acquisition of California, however, the postal service had to dramatically raise rates again. Most letters traveled to the West Coast by ship around Cape Horn, a passage that took up to three months and cost half a dollar per letter. If you were in a hurry, you could pay a full dollar for a letter that would be shipped to Panama, then travel cross the Isthmus of Panama by mule, then would be loaded onto a different boat to be shipped to San Francisco, arriving in the incredible time of only three weeks.
And then, we got airmail. Not really, but it was the airmail of its day. For a brief period, lasting only 18 months, your mail could travel by a private mail service called the Pony Express that would carry the lightest possible letter from Saint Joseph, Missouri to San Francisco in only ten days.
Perhaps no one has ever described the Pony Express better than Mark Twain, who witnessed one of the riders in 1861 while traveling to Nevada by stagecoach:
“Both rider and horse went ‘flying light.’ The rider's dress was thin, and fitted close; he wore a "roundabout," and a skull cap, and tucked his pantaloons into his boot-tops like a race-rider. He carried no arms—he carried only what was not absolutely necessary, for even the postage on his literary freight was worth five dollars a letter. He got but little frivolous correspondence to carry —his bag had business letters in it, mostly. His horse was stripped of all unnecessary weight, too. He wore a little wafer of a racing saddle, and no visible blanket. He wore light shoes, or none at all. The little flat mail-pockets strapped under the rider's thighs would each hold about the bulk of a child's primer. They held many and many an important business chapter and newspaper letter, but these were written on paper as airy and thin as gold-leaf, nearly, and thus bulk and weight were economized. The stage-coach traveled about a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five miles a day (twenty-four hours), the pony-rider about two hundred and fifty. There were about eighty pony riders in the saddle all the time, night and day, stretching in a long, scattering procession from Missouri to California, forty flying eastward, and forty toward the west, and among them making four hundred gallant horses earn as tiring livelihood and see a deal of scenery every single day in the year.” (Roughing It, Chapter 8.)
Now we bring in airmail.
In June 1910, just seven years after the Wright Brother’s first flight, Congressman Shepherd Morris of Texas introduced a bill charging the Postmaster General to investigate the possibility of using airplanes to ship the mail. The bill promptly died in committee as New York papers ridiculed the ridiculous idea.
Love letters will be carried in a rose-pink aeroplane, steered by Cupid’s wings and operated by perfumed gasoline. … [and] postmen will wear wired coat tails and on their feet will be wings.
Despite the public ridicule, within months the Postmaster began authorizing demonstration flights of the mail for short ranges by airplane. More publicity stunts than practical deliveries, there was no doubt that as soon as the technology of flight became practical, the postal service would begin transport by mail.
Regular airmail service started in 1918, with transcontinental service beginning two years later. Though interrupted by World War II, international airmail began in 1939 and was using jet aircraft only twenty years later. Unfortunately, regular airmail service ended in 1977, and today, only about 1% of our domestic mail travels by air.
There is, of course, a noticeable trend in the evolution of mail service: as technology advances, mail service gets faster and the relative cost decreases, but something intangible is lost in the process. Today, an email reaches me within seconds of being sent, but it lacks the emotional weight of that airmail letter…it lacks the touch of intimacy.
As Emily Dickinson said, “The ways that letters go Are lovely as the ways the light goes – The sun himself is known to lose his way Yet find it, in a letter's ray."
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Normally, I would never force comments to be moderated. However, in the last month, Russian hackers have added hundreds of bogus comments, most of which either talk about Ukraine or try to sell some crappy product. As soon as they stop, I'll turn this nonsense off.