標準歴史・文化

The History of the Postal Service

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Systems for carrying messages are very old. In Persia, riders on horseback passed letters from one station to the next so that news could cross the empire in days rather than weeks. Rome built a network along its roads. These services, however, were not made for people. They belonged to the ruler and were used for orders, tax records, and military news. A farmer who wished to write to a in another town had to find a traveler who happened to be going that way. By the seventeenth century, several European states had opened their systems to the , but sending a letter was still . The depended on the and on the number of sheets of paper, and it was usually the person who received the letter who paid. Many people refused letters they could not , and the post office was left with the . Some senders even wrote short messages on the outside of the so that the receiver could read them and then to pay. In 1840, Britain changed the system . A teacher named Rowland Hill argued that most of the lay not in the itself but in the paperwork of calculating a for every letter. He proposed a single low for any letter under a weight, paid in by the sender. To show that had been made, a small piece of printed paper was stuck to the . The first of these stamps carried a picture of the queen. The was a sharp in the number of letters, and other countries soon copied the idea. Today, however, letters have fallen year after year, since messages now travel instantly and at no . At the same time, online shopping has greatly increased the number of parcels. Postal companies have therefore changed their business, delivering fewer letters and more boxes. In Japan and parts of Europe, post offices have also taken on quite different work, such as banking and checking on residents. In many countries there is about whether small offices in the should be kept open.