When the Post Office was cutting-edge
For nearly 200 years, mail service in the United States was a hotbed of new ideas and innovation, said author and researcher Kevin Kosar. Where did it all go wrong?
I N 1897, A year when mail was still largely delivered by horse and wagon, construction began on an innovative scheme beneath the streets of Philadelphia. Using an intricate network of compressors and metal pipes, the new system could shoot a capsule holding a few hundred letters across a city in several minutes, far faster than a postman could get it there. The investor in this new technology wasn’t some kind of delivery startup, the FedEx or UPS of its day. It was the U.S. Post Office. Behind the experiment was Postmaster General John Wanamaker, who was inspired by Paris, London, and other European cities that were trying out pneumatic posts. It seemed a natural fit for America’s growing metropolises, where mail was hauled by horse cart and carried on foot. Wanamaker had the sense not to try to concoct such a system in-house, since the agency had no such expertise. So he did something clever: He called for private proposals to build pneumatic tube systems. The Pneumatic Transit Co. of New Jersey was the winning bidder, and a public-private partnership was born. It agreed to pay to build the system, then to charge the Post Office for its use. The first tube could shoot a capsule of mail nearly three-fifths of a mile through a 6.5-inch tube from the city’s main post office to the East Chester Street post office. Soon, similar systems were installed in Boston, St. Louis, and Chicago. New York City’s system, the largest, could move 6 million pieces per day at 30 miles per hour from the Bronx to Manhattan and Brooklyn. Collectively, the Post Office’s pneumatic tube system ran more than 120 miles, with 130 postal “rocketeers” feeding mail into it every 15 seconds. When Americans think about the most innovative agency in the government, they think about the Pentagon or NASA. But throughout much of its history, that title could just as easily have fallen to the Post Office, which was a hotbed of new, interesting, sometimes crazy ideas as it sought to accomplish a seemingly simple task: deliver mail quickly and cheaply. The Post Office experimented with everything from stagecoaches to airplanes—even pondered sending mail cross-country on a missile. to anywhere in the country— was immense. In turn, Congress gave the agency a good amount of operational freedom. In 1785, Congress authorized the Post Office to hire private stagecoaches to deliver mail. It was a smart idea that leveraged private-sector investments in transportation but did not commit the agency itself to bearing the great cost of purchasing horses and hiring riders. Later, the Post Office would contract to have mail carried by steamboats, railroads, and private delivery companies. The agency also had the authority to erect post offices, but at first it licensed tavern owners to provide postal services to thirsty For decades, the agency integrated new customers instead. That changed during technologies and adapted to changing the 19th century, when the postal service environments, underpinning its ability to expanded massively. In 1790, the nation had deliver billions of pieces of mail every year, 75 post offices; by 1900, there were more from the beaches of Miami to the banks of than 76,000. Then came home delivery: Alaska, for just cents per letter. Mail reached many city dwellers at home by We think a lot about how innovation arises, the mid-1860s and expanded to farmhouses but not enough about how it gets quashed. and remote houses in the 1880s. Henry Ford And the United States Postal Service is a built his first car in 1901. Four years later, great example of both. Today, what was the Post Office was experimenting with mail once a locus of innovation has become delivery by automobile. a tired example of bureaucratic inertia The first half of the 20th century was and government mismanagement. But its a dynamic time for the Post Office. It descent into its current state was not foretold. immensely improved delivery by adopting A series of misguided rules and laws innovations from the private sector and have clipped the Post Office’s wings, turning abroad. Much like the pneumatic tubes, one of the great inventors of the government some of the schemes incorporated new into yet another clunky bureaucracy. technology we no longer even associate I N A SENSE, innovation was baked into with mail. During World War II, the Post the Post Office from the beginning. Office adopted V-Mail, an idea pioneered America’s national postal service precedes in England. Families wishing to correspond the founding: It was born in July with soldiers overseas would write the letter 1775, a year before the Declaration of on a V-Mail form, which was placed in Independence was ratified. During the a capsule and shipped to a facility where American Revolution, the U.S. postal system’s it was scanned to microfilm. The hundredfoot duty was to deliver communications rolls of film, which could hold 1,700 between Congress and the military commanders letters, were carried overseas and unsealed, fighting the British. And for the and then the letters were individually first postmaster general, Congress appointed printed and delivered to GI recipients.
O an inveterate tinkerer, Benjamin Franklin.
VERSHADOWING ALL THE invention, He rigged up a system of contractors to however, was the creeping haul mail by horse and on foot. It worked. sclerosis of the Post Office as an From the start, the Post Office Department, institution. As a monopoly, it was insulated as it was called until 1970, had to be innovative. from competitive pressures, allowing inefficiency There was little money to fund the to creep into its operations and startup agency, and its task—delivering mail management. Worse, political interests had