The Strangest Ways the Postal Service Has Delivered Mail
Now that the future has finally arrived and robots are delivering mail through the streets of major cities, it might seem — to some of us older folks, at least — that things can’t get much stranger. But the U.S. Postal Service has always found innovative solutions to ensure the mail gets through, often requiring what could be considered out-of-the-box thinking.
In decades past, when trucks and mailboxes weren’t an option, improvisation led to some peculiar methods of getting the mail from point A to point B. Here are five of the strangest and most surprising methods the Postal Service has used over the years to get a letter to its destination.
By Underground Tubes
The first pneumatic tubes for delivering messages through a city were installed in London in 1853, and similar systems were built in American cities beginning in the 1890s. Sprawling networks of pressurized tubes blasted canisters of mail beneath the streets of Philadelphia, then Boston, New York City, Chicago, and St. Louis.
New York’s system, which opened in 1897, stretched for 27 miles and connected 23 post offices, using compressed air to shoot canisters through cast-iron pipes at roughly 30 miles per hour. The system transported millions of letters across Manhattan and Brooklyn every day, until it was eventually abandoned in 1953. With the rise of mail trucks, the U.S. Postal Service eventually deemed the pneumatic tubes “obsolete, unnecessary, and excessively expensive,” and they have lain dormant ever since.
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By Dogsled
During the Klondike gold rush in Alaska in the late 1890s, remote mining towns had no roads, and frozen winters made standard modes of transportation impossible. So, the Post Office Department (as it was then called) turned to sled dogs. By 1901, teams of eight to 10 dogs — all fueled by dried fish and wearing handmade booties to protect their feet — regularly hauled 500 to 700 pounds of mail along various routes, none more famous than the 2,300-mile Iditarod Trail from Seward to Nome. The system remained in official use for decades, even after airplanes took over the majority of routes in the 1920s and ’30s. The very last scheduled dogsled mail route was retired in 1963.
By Reindeer
For a couple of decades at the turn of the 20th century, some of that same Alaskan mail was pulled not by dogs, but by reindeer. Postal officials found that reindeer could carry between 200 and 300 pounds of mail each — much more than an individual sled dog. And unlike dogs, the reindeer could also forage for their own food along the trail, rather than requiring supplies to be hauled or stored in advance.
The first reindeer postal route launched in 1899, carrying mail from St. Michael to Kotzebue over three 1,240-mile, 60-day round trips. Other routes were established, but none lasted beyond the early 1920s, when dogsled and horse sled routes took over. But for a short while, Santa’s preferred mode of transportation was a very real delivery method in Alaska.
By Guided Missile
On June 8, 1959, the Post Office Department tested quite possibly its strangest idea ever: firing mail out of a submarine. Working with the Navy, postal officials loaded 3,000 letters into a modified Regulus I cruise missile on board the U.S.S. Barbero (replacing what would normally have been a nuclear warhead). The missile was launched and covered 100 miles before landing safely — with the mail intact — at a naval air station in Florida in just 22 minutes.
The test was a success, and Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield declared that missile mail would soon be shooting all across the U.S. and overseas. That plan, however, never came to be. The military wasn’t too keen on using their expensive missiles for delivering birthday cards and love letters, preferring instead to save them for more important things, especially in the midst of the Cold War.
By Jumping Off Moving Boats
On Geneva Lake in Wisconsin, mail carriers have been leaping from a moving boat onto private docks since 1873, a tradition that predates the town’s paved roads and is still going today. Aboard the U.S. Mailboat Walworth, young mail jumpers, as they’re officially known, hop off the boat — while it cruises at about 5 miles per hour — and onto each pier to drop mail into a box. They then sprint back and jump aboard again while the boat is still moving. The route continues to serve dozens of lakeside properties, making it one of the last mail delivery methods left in the country that requires its carriers to be incredibly nimble — and sometimes end up in the lake.
