June 8, 1959: They'll Never Complain About Slow Postal Service Again

“Rocket mail” becomes “missile mail” when 3,000 pieces of mail are delivered by a cruise missile fired from a U.S. Navy submarine.
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1959: “Rocket mail” becomes “missile mail” when 3,000 pieces of mail are delivered by a cruise missile fired from a U.S. Navy submarine.

Experiments in delivering mail by rocket had met with mixed success since the first rocket mail was sent between two Austrian villages in 1931. The first successful delivery by this method in the United States occurred in 1936, when two rockets fired from Greenwood Lake, New Jersey, landed on the New York shore about a thousand feet away.

The 1959 attempt, however, was something entirely new, because the mail was not packed in rockets built for the purpose but stowed in mail containers that replaced a nuclear warhead on top of a missile built for war. Because this was strictly an experiment, the mail consisted entirely of commemorative postal covers addressed to a host of government officials, including President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The missile was fired shortly before noon from a launcher aboard the submarine USS Barbero, cruising off the coast of Virginia. Twenty-two minutes after launch, the missile struck its target at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station in Mayport, Florida.

The mail was retrieved, sorted and routed in the usual way from a post office in nearby Jacksonville.

Rocket mail, which has a whiff of theatrics to it, still exists and still has advocates around the world. Since the end of the Cold War, a number of surplus missiles culled from the Soviet nuclear arsenal have been used to fire mail around Russia, including a few experimental launches from nuclear subs.

Source: Wikipedia

This article first appeared on Wired.com June 8, 2007.

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