William H. Russell, Alexander Majors and William B. Waddell founded the Pony Express mail service on 1860. This was a very innovative concept: riders with letters on horseback racing from California to Missouri (and vice versa) in order to deliver mail on time. The first mail arrived on April 14th. During 18 months, and before the telegraph, it became the most direct means of communication from coast to coast in the USA, by reducing the time for messages to about 10 days.
I wonder how much time a letter needs in order to travel from the East coast to the West coast of the USA nowadays...
To honour the 155th anniversary (two days ago), Google put an interactive highly addictive time wasting game on some of his local homepages. It has you picking up and delivering mail while fighting various obstacles, including bandits, avalanches, rivers and giant cactus, on your way.
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Great google doodle game. I managed to get an 85 yesterday.
ReplyDeleteAnd currently domestic mail is supposed to take 2-3 days to get from anywhere to anywhere in the continental US - although I find 3 days to be optimistic!
I repeat: you're the real postmaster here!
Delete3 days? That's really great. I'm used to longer waiting.
Played the game as well, which was fun, but did not think at all of mail....no good
ReplyDeletebisous, EvaJ
Moi aussi, je ne suis arrivé qu'avec 16 ou 17 lettres... C'est normal: je ne sais même pas monter à cheval! :D
DeleteI was addicted to it :DDD If you could not see it from M., how did you find out?
ReplyDeleteThrough Twitter. Then I read about in some blogs.
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