The first regular airmail service

Do you know that the first regular airmail service began in 1837-before the time of airplanes?

New Zealander who kept pigeons trained them to fly from Great Barrier Island to Auckland. The flight took just an hour. Earlier it had taken about two days to take the letter by a boat. As there was no telegraph service there, people asked him to use pigeons for delivering letters. A regular “pigeon post” began. The letters were fixed to a bird’s leg.

It cost sixpence to send a letter from the Island to Auckland and a shilling for the back journey-because it was more difficult to train birds to fly to the Island.

The most famous stamp

It was in 1856. The Postmaster of Britain Guiana was in a difficulty. He had used all the stamps, and new stamps which they usually got from London, did not arrive yet. He did not know what to do. But then he found a way out: he asked a local printer to make some stamps which he used until the new ones arrived.

Seventeen years later, a schoolboy who lived in British Guiana noticed on an envelope of old letters a strange stamp. It was dirty but the boy liked it and added it to his collection.

Some time later he showed his stamp to a well-known collector. The man gave him six shillings for the stamp. That stamp, which the boy had sold, became the most famous of all the world’s stamps. The stamp collector didn’t know how valuable it was.

Some years later he sold the stamp. The man who had bought it later sold it in Paris to Philip von Terrary who had the greatest stamp collection in the world. The stamp was in a poor state. But Philip was very proud to have it because he knew it was unique. Philip von Terrary died in 1917 and the stamp was offered for sale. It was bought for $7,343 by a collector from the USA.

Telexes

Telegrams sent with the help of teleprints are called telexes. Telexes are mostly used for information which is urgent for you to have or to pass. The Telex network is world-wide and links over 400,000 subscribers in over 50 different countries.

The telex system provides a 24-hour service, and messages may be sent to a subscriber even when his teleprinter is unattended, if it has not been switched off. So, it is possible to send messages at night ready to be dealt with first thing next morning. All calls are charged on a time-and-distance basis.

Telexes should be short, exact and clear. They are often written without the Opening Salutation or the Complimentary Closing and without paragraphs. Very often conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns and punctuation marks may be omitted if it does not impair the meaning of the message. To mark the end of the sentence the word “stop” or a fullstop may be used. As a rule no capital letters are used in telex messages.

In the Office

A business man needs to communicate with other business men. He can do this by using the telephone. He can also do it by writing, but the modern business man does not write his letters by hand. He dictates them to a shorthand typist, usually a woman. She types the letters on her machine and later takes them to be signed. When all the letters have been signed, they are put in envelopes and are ready for the post. Small offices employ a boy to stick stamps on envelopes, but large offices today have a machine which, as envelopes are passed through it, automatically prints a stamp on them in ink. There is a meter in the machine. This is set and locked by a Post Office official according to the amount of money that is paid in advance. When this amount is reached the machine no longer works and must be reset.

It is not necessary to type an address on the envelope. There are envelopes with a “window” of transparent paper, and the letter can be folded so that the name and the address typed on the letter can be seen through this “window”. The telephone is an important part of the communication system. The head of a large department usually has two telephones on his desk. One is connected, through a switchboard, to the public Post Office system. The other is connected to a private internal system. This makes it possible for members of the staff in different parts of the same building to talk to one another without leaving their rooms.

Telephone bells are noisy, so in most offices telephones usually have a quiet buzzer instead of a bell. The loud ringing of bells does not help a man to think about his work.