Zip Mail Services history

After a brief return to the farming system, a general Directorate of Posts attached to the Ministry of Finance was created in 1804.

In addition, a full ten years before waterways became official post roads in 1823, the Post Office had begun using steamboats to transport mail between river-linked towns that shared no common road.

In 1829, President Andrew Jackson invited Postmaster General William T. Barry to sit as a cabinet member, although Jackson had no formal authority for the move.

By 1831, it had begun sending mail short distances via trains--the 'iron horses' that many people denounced as demonic devices--and five years later awarded its first mail contract to a rail carrier.

On May 7, 1833, 24-year-old Lincoln was appointed Postmaster of New Salem, Illinois.

Lincoln served until the office was closed May 30, 1836.

In 1837 the Imperial Post was established and granted a monopoly to provide efficient postal communications between the seat of government at Calcutta and the principal provincial towns.

The first traveling, or railway, post offices ran in 1838 between Birmingham and Liverpool and London and Preston.

In addition, by 1840 all railroads in the United States had been designated as postal routes, which quickly expanded rail service, the main means of moving large quantities of mail well into the next century.

The chief features of Hill’s system were gradually adopted in varying degrees by other countries throughout the world, first among which were Switzerland and Brazil in 1843.

The first known female mail carrier was Sarah Black, mail messenger, Charlestown, MD, 1845.

The Post Office Department issued its first postage stamps on July 1, 1847.

The first French postage stamp was issued on January 1, 1849, thereby introducing the principle of prepayment as well as simplifying the rate structure.

Under British rule in 1852, the province of Sind had the distinction of being the first region in the subcontinent to adopt a uniform letter postage rate.

In 1854 the basis of the modern Indian Post Office was established when these parallel systems were merged under a director general.

The range of services available to the public has also grown steadily since the first supplementary postal service, registered mail, was introduced in 1855.

Only Franklin and Washington appeared on stamps until 1856, when a five-cent stamp honoring Thomas Jefferson was issued.

A solution was attempted by the Central Overland California and Pike's Peak Express Company, which, without a contract with the Post Office, in 1860 began operating a mail carrier service between St Joseph, Missouri, and California.

In March 1861, the Pony Express carried President Lincoln's inaugural address over the route in less than eight days, encouraging the Post Office to put the service under federal contract.

A traveling post-office system, in which mail could be sorted in transit, was introduced experimentally in 1862, and it made railway mail service the dominant form of mail conveyance well into the 20th century.

The first practical step toward reform did not come until May 1863, when the delegates of 15 European and American postal administrations met at the Paris Postal Conference, convening at the suggestion of the United States postmaster general.

As late as November 1866, less than half of the post offices in the South had been fully restored to service.

The first known African American Postmaster was James W. Mason, Sunny Side, AR, 1867.

In 1868, however, a plan for a general postal union was put forward by the director of posts of the North German Confederation.

At first only letters were handled on the postal cars, but by 1869 all other types except parcels were being processed.

The first known African American postal inspector was Isaac Myers, Baltimore, MD, 1870.

1872: The postal service is officially recognized by Congress as the Post Office Department.

In 1873 the postal service was proclaimed a monopoly and private courier systems were prohibited, a uniform postal tariff scale was adopted, and postage stamps and postcards were introduced.

Eventually, an international postal congress met, on September 15, 1874, in Bern.

On October 9 a “Treaty concerning the Establishment of a General Postal Union” was signed. It was implemented on July 1, 1875, when the General Postal Union came into being.

International postal relations expanded rapidly, and in 1877 Japan became a member of the UPU.

In 1883 a parcel post service was established.

Post Offices were first required to display the American flag in 1885 to comply with Treasury Department instructions.

Experiments with RFD were begun in West Virginia in 1896, despite vituperative complaints about its exorbitant cost and general impracticality.

By 1900 the service was provided at 796 offices by 15,322 carriers.

In the same year that it inaugurated RFD, the Post Office began experimenting with the 'horseless wagon' and in 1901 awarded its first contract for a horseless carrier covering a short route in Buffalo.

The first American woman on a United States postage stamp was Martha Washington, 1902.

The first Native American on a stamp was Pocahontas, 1907.

The sweeping social reforms of the 20th century have given the post office an additional role as the chief payment agency for social security benefits, beginning with old-age pensions in 1908.

During the middle years of the Ch’ing dynasty (1644–1911/12), there were several thousand of these private post offices.

In 1912, Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock authorized local postmasters to allow postal employees and citizens to respond to letters addressed to Santa Claus and the program came to be known as Operation Santa.

1914: The Post Office Department forms its own fleet of motorized carriers.

1918: Formal airmail service is introduced.

The public was at first reluctant to pay the 24 cents charged for airmail letters, but interest picked up by 1920, when, on September 8, the last links were made to connect New York and San Francisco.

The last of the foreign post offices (maintained by Britain, the United States, France, Germany, and the Soviet Union) was withdrawn by the end of 1922.

In 1924 the postal administration was accorded a considerable degree of financial autonomy, which allowed it to conduct business in a semicommercial manner, while still taking account of national economic and social factors in determining rate structure and pattern of service.

By 1926, when the Post Office began contracting service with commercial airlines, it had won several awards for its pioneer work in night flying, the development of navigational aids, and the general advance of aviation in the United States.

The transfer of equipment and stations to the Department of Commerce and municipalities was completed by 1927, when the Post Office put all airmail service under contract to independent carriers.

The Bolger Center is a Postal Service-owned state of the art training facility located on 83 beautiful acres in Potomac, Maryland. It was built in the 1930’s as a Catholic convent by the Sisters of Mercy.

Balloon posts, apart from those organized during the sieges of Paris (1870) and Przemyśl (1915), for the most part only carried souvenir mail, owing to the balloons’ uncontrollability. It was not until 1939 that a regular air service across the North Atlantic was launched with the takeoff of the Yankee Clipper, an American seaplane, on May 20.

Use of the postal system increased significantly after 1940, so efforts were made to simplify the sorting and delivery process.

In 1943, a system of postal districts was formed for major cities.

The reinstatement of night airmail service in 1945 marked the beginning of a period of rapid reorganization for the postwar French postal service.

Although Pakistan did not exist as an independent sovereign state until 1947, its postal history extends to the official postal systems established by Muslim emperors.

One month after the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications was established.

In 1952 an airmail service was introduced between East and West Pakistan in which letters and postcards were carried without payment of surcharge.

Leading the way toward automation was a parcel sorting machine first used in Baltimore in 1956, but it was quickly followed by the importation and use of the Transmora, a foreign-manufactured, multi-position letter sorter.

In 1961, the USPS increased efficiency by implementing the Nationwide Improved Mail Service system.

In the Postal Service and Federal Employees Salary Act of 1962, Congress required post offices to hold any foreign communist materials, and only release them if the recipient specifically requested it.

Underfunding also had meant a continued reliance on antiquated facilities and equipment and mail-handling methods that, except for the introduction of the ZIP Code in 1963, had not changed since the turn of the century, despite a vastly expanded volume of mail.

Annual report of the Postmaster General (Washington, D.C. : United States Postal Service, 1965), p.33.

The resulting inefficiency led to long delays in service, with jams that from time to time brought it to a virtual standstill, like that at the Chicago Post Office in 1966.

Mostly notably is the Census Bureau, which was predicted by the Postal Service back in their 1967 annual report.

To facilitate this process, a postal code address system was introduced in July 1968.

To speed up and reduce the cost of processing this huge quantity of mail traffic, the French postal service introduced a two-tier system in January 1969, thus enabling the customer to choose the priority of service desired by paying an appropriate charge.

On August 12, 1970, after months of negotiation, the Postal Reorganization Act became law.

The creation of Bangladesh out of East Pakistan in 1971 allowed Pakistan to improve its internal mail services, especially in rural areas, where three-fourths of the post offices are located.

In 1978, it developed an expanded ZIP Code, which helped reduce the number of times mail had to be handled.

In the 1980’s, it was purchased by the United States Postal Service as a training center.

The British Telecommunications Act of 1981 divided the post office into two corporations, one for postal and banking operations and the other for telecommunications.

In 1982, to exploit fully the revised ZIP Codes, the Postal Service installed its first computer-operated OCRs and barcode sorters (BCSs) and the next year introduced the ZIP+4 code to further define address sectors in any geographical area.

In 1983, the USPS expanded ZIP codes further by introducing the ZIP+4 system.

By 1985, the new equipment and ZIP Code refinements had made it possible for each key postal center to process 24,000 pieces of mail per hour, making it approximately four times as efficient as it had been using older sorting machines.

They earned an estimated $135 billion in 1986, according to industry sources; in doing so, direct marketers touched virtually every American household through the mailbox.

Alarmingly, it grew to 166.3 billion by 1990, and although the rate of growth abated thereafter, the problem of handling that quantity of mail remained formidable.

In fact, in 1991, it declined for the first time in 15 years.

That competition caused the USPS, led by Postmaster General Marvin Runyon, who began his tenure in 1992, to undertake some restructuring.

In 1993, the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum opened.

The Postal Service launched its first public internet site in 1994.

A five-year investment program of $17 billion was implemented in 1995, and the USPS committed to investing in modernizing and automating numerous operations and acquiring new vehicles and facilities.

By 1998, the Postal Service acknowledged, operations were being affected by the growing popularity of computerized banking and online bill-paying services.

In August 1999 the USPS introduced online postage services, known as PC Postage.

Since good communications were clearly essential for governing the extensive empires of the ancient world, it is not surprising that among the earliest historical references to postal systems were those concerning Egypt about 2000 bc and China under the Chou dynasty 1,000 years later.

In 2003 the Royal Mail announced that it would discontinue distribution by rail, a move that drew protests from transport unions and environmental groups.

The law increased the power of the Postal Regulatory Commission to regulate and investigate fraud and misconduct at the USPS. It also placed limits on how much the USPS could hike the price of stamps in order to prevent future rate shocks like the one customers experienced in 2005.

In the face of public outrage and institutional concerns, Congress passed, with broad bipartisan support, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006.

The 2007 recession sent shockwaves through the USPS. The volume of first-class mail sent sharply declined, a trend that continues today.

In 2013, the William H. Gross Stamp Gallery — the largest in the world — opened at the museum.

The first female Postmaster General was Megan J. Brennan, Washington, DC, 2015.

In 2017, the Postal Service launched a pilot test of a digital Operation Santa option for residents of New York City.

Five murals were featured on First-Class postage stamps in 2019

In 2020, the program expanded nationwide for the first time.

In 2021, the Postal Service replaced 31,874 American Flags and 27,550 POW/MIA Flags.