National Postal Museum

Flying the Mail - December 1918

By Nancy Pope, Historian

This is the second in a series of posts highlighting the lives and work of the remarkable kings of the skies, the airmail pilots.

America’s regularly scheduled airmail service began on May 15, 1918 with a series of flights connecting Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New York City. Pilots were required to keep the mail moving by air every day. In 1918, flying was still a difficult skill to master. Aircraft were flimsy and prone to breakdowns. While the Post Office Department had skilled mechanics stationed at its airfields, errors and weather could quickly challenge or ruin a flight, leaving mailbags far from their destination, airplanes in crumbled heaps, and pilots injured, or worse.

New York City Postmaster Thomas Patten handing Lt. Torrey Webb a bag of airmail letters for one of the first regularly scheduled airmail flights in the United States in 1918.

The first December of airmail service was rife with problems and challenges. Even aside from the disastrous attempt by Otto Praeger, the postal official in charge of the service, to add a route from New York to Chicago that month (read about that here), keeping the mail moving between Washington, Philadelphia, and New York on a regular basis could be challenging.

Pilots had to practice takeoffs and landings and even trail seasoned airmail pilots on their prospective routes before being entrusted with the US mail. Dan Davison was a young pilot in training that December. He had joined the service December 2, 1918 and spent the week training for his job. On December 7, he was trailing veteran pilot Maurice Newton from the Belmont Park, Long Island field to Elizabeth, New Jersey. After landing Newton sent Davison back to fly another airplane to the field. Davison left Belmont at 3:40 with 60 gallons of gas. According to a telegram sent to Praeger, Davison "arrived to the south of this field about 4 pm, passed onto the west and came back approached the field again and then headed south again going out of sight. About 4:50 I received a telephone from him that he was down at Grant City, Staten Island. Landing gear broken, propeller and two lower wings broken, radiator broken."

Davison’s defense was that he became confused flying over Staten Island and “while endeavoring to find fixed the air pressure on the main tank failed. . . it becoming necessary to land which I did at 4:40, on a golf link breaking landing gear and both lower wings, radiator and propeller." Davison’s skills did not improve, and by the first week of January he was removed from the service.

Side-view of a deHavilland DH-4 airplane

Less fortunate was airmail pilot Carl B. Smith. He had also joined the service on December 2. While test flying modified de Havilland airplane (DH-4) #39464, on December 16, 1918 Smith was killed when the airplane stalled midflight and fell into a tail spin. He died in a crash at the Standard Aviation field in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Smith was the first pilot killed in the US airmail service. Smith had been seated in the front cockpit between the mail cockpit and the engine and was crushed between the two in the crash. Smith’s death led to further modifications of the DH-4 airplane, moving the pilot’s seat to the rear of the mail cockpit. This modification was one of several that turned the failing de Havilland DH-4 (nicknamed “flaming coffin”) into the successful DH-4B (nicknamed “workhorse of the airmail service).

Airmail pilot Lyman Doty.

Airmail pilot Lyman Doty joined the service on December 6, 1918. On December 28 he was flying mail from New York to Philadelphia in an unmodified de Havilland DH-4. The engine began to miss over Brooklyn, so Doty turned to head back to the Belmont landing field. During the landing, a faulty axle gave way and the fuselage crumpled. Trapped in the front compartment, Doty was badly hurt and rushed to a hospital in Jamaica, New York and the mail was placed onto a train for Philadelphia. By the next summer, Doty was well enough to return to flying the mail, and did so. Sadly, the brave pilot was killed in an airmail crash the following October. Witnesses near Catonsville, Maryland, saw his airplane flying low in a thick fog. As they watched in horror, Doty's airplane hit the top of a tree and plunged to ground where the airplane turned over and caught fire.

Davison, Smith, and Doty were three of the more than 200 pilots who flew the mail as employees of the US Post Office Department from 1918-1927. Many of these men were able to transfer their skills into flying the mail for privately-0wned companies as the service transferred from Department-operated into contracts with private airlines.

Introducing "Systems at Work"

Tad Suiter, Assistant Curator, Systems at Work

From wedding invitations to legal documents to twenty dollars in a card from grandma, we all depend on the postal service to get our mail where it is going, and to do so quickly, affordably, and reliably.

You drop a letter in a blue box. Days later, it’s at the address you wrote on the envelope-- clear across the country for less than 50-cents. But how does it work? How does the mail get from point A to point B?

This is one of the most commonly-asked questions by visitors. The National Postal Museum is proud to present Systems at Work, a new permanent exhibit dedicated to answering that very question. The exhibit explores the processing technology of the postal system and how those systems have evolved over the last two hundred years.

A view into the exhibit, Systems at Work.

At the center of the exhibit is an immersive 270° film experience that brings you into a modern mail processing facility, following letters, magazines, and packages as they join the approximately 700 million other pieces of mail that are sorted and delivered to 150 million addresses.

 The service depends on an astonishing network of people and technology that collects, carries, sorts, and delivers the mail. Seeing the size of the facilities in this network, and watching the mail as it flies past is a truly impressive experience and conveys the system’s impressive scale and (perhaps surprisingly) advanced technology.

As visitors pass through the exhibit, they will have an opportunity to explore the history that brought us to this point-- the technological innovations that have allowed the postal system to keep up with a nation that has changed radically and frequently over the last two hundred years. In 1808, a newspaper carries the latest news of a still-young nation to people hundreds of miles away. In the 1930s, a crate of eggs journeys from Seattle, Washington, to Alaska. In the twenty-first century, optical character readers process more than 10 letters per second. 

The exhibit offers a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of America’s post office through time. It is a long, continuous history of implementing new technologies and processes, including ships, planes, rural free delivery, fluorescent inks, ZIP codes, computers, scanners, and automated sorting machinery the size of a football field, to name but a few.

While the very question of the postal service’s survival is a hotly debated topic among Americans, few understand how the service operates. Today’s postal system is under intense public scrutiny. While mail volume shrinks, the number of addresses steadily increases. The cost of continuing to provide mail service to everyone while revenues decrease puts the US Postal Service in a Catch-22.

Systems at Work brings visitors into the heart of postal operations, and puts the evolution of that system in historical context. The goal of the exhibit is to take a vast network that most people never see, and make it visible, and help Americans better understand the intricacies of the postal debate.

What Role Does Mail Play In Your Life Today?

This question is a part of the museum's Systems at Work exhibit. We encourage the exhibits online visitors to leave their thoughts on these topics, just as visitors to the actual exhibit are doing.

 

Americans began to write fewer letters in the late 20th century. As more women moved into the workplace, less time was left at home for casual correspondence. At the same time, card companies were expanding their selections to cover just about any event or occasion that could arise. By the time that email became commonplace in first decades of the 21st century most of us had lost the habit of letter writing.

The black border of this 1861 envelope mark it as a “mourning” letter. The style was used for a period after the death in a family. This envelope was addressed to William Rives, a member of the Provisional Confederate Congress from his son.

Today we often seem to think of the mail more as receivers than senders. Our attention is paid to what comes into the mailbox, with little time spent on sending out items. And what is coming into the mailbox? Often its catalogs and product offers, although thanks to the recession, there seem to be far fewer “you are pre-approved” credit card offers. What tends to draw our attention to our mailboxes more often than not anymore are the packages that arrive after we have let our fingers do the walking through the online shopping world.

An example of modern direct marketing – a catalog with changing covers, depending on the last name of the recipient.

What role does mail play in your life today?  Tell us in the comments below.

In Today's Postal System, What Do You Think Needs To Be Improved?

This question is a part of the museum's Systems at Work exhibit. We encourage the exhibits online visitors to leave their thoughts on these topics, just as visitors to the actual exhibit are doing.

 

Postal workers have used a variety of machines to help sort and process mail as quickly as inventors could create them. What seems easy, mailing and receiving a letter, is only deceptively simple. The size of the United States, combined with its growing population (of many different national origins and writing styles) and (until recently) ever-increasing mail volumes, has long made mailing and receiving a letter a challenging process.

There are four aspects to mails’ journey. It is collected, or deposited, into the postal system. Then it is processed, and then transported (these two aspects are often interchangeable and can repeat often), and finally it is delivered.

Collection (or depositing) mail usually involves mailboxes and post offices. Mailbox design has to take into account weather, security, attractiveness, (yes, attractiveness. Some early collection mailboxes were rejected by local officials for ruining a street view), strength, and ease of use. Inventers spent decades working on collection mailboxes that combined these attributes, only to often fail at one of them. The mailbox designed by Willard Doremus was attractive and easy to use, but not very strong. The lip covering the letter slot was weak and often broke, letting in rain, snow, and mail thieves.

Letter carrier collecting mail from a sidewalk collection mailbox.

Transporting mail in the past has provided some of the more interesting examples of problem solving. Postal officials often contracted with private carriers to move mail through and into low population areas, finding it cheaper to rely on the contractors to come up with a way to best move the mail. Contractors have carried mail by dogsled or on skis in snow-covered areas, by boat over lakes and rivers, and even by mule into the Grand Canyon (a system that continues today). Postal officials usually purchased vehicles “off the rack,” looking for the vehicle that best fit their needs. In the 1980s they turned that process on its head and advertised their requirements for a new vehicle. The now ubiquitous Long Life Vehicle was the result of that competition.

Processing mail is an area which saw little change for most of the system’s history. Postal clerks were handsorting mail into pigeon-hole sorting cases well into the mid 20th century. By the 1960s machines had begun what would be the system’s most dramatic change of all. Today’s postal employees work amongst automated machines that are the length of a football field. The contemporary postal sorting facility is definitely not their father’s post office.

Today’s mail processing facilities are filled with automated machines that do the work of hundreds of employees.

The final step, or “last mile” as it is known to postal workers, is delivery. While delivery itself dates to the Civil War era, it is a process that has not changed significantly. While the services surrounding delivery are definitely 21st century (tracking, for instance), our letters, catalogs, and packages are still brought to our doors (or mailboxes) by letter carriers.

Looking at the postal system as it works today – what do you think needs to be improved? Design a machine for making that improvement – what would it be? What would it look like?

 

What's the Biggest Challenge Facing the U.S. Postal Service Today?

This question is a part of the museum's Systems at Work exhibit. We encourage the exhibits online visitors to leave their thoughts on these topics, just as visitors to the actual exhibit are doing.

 

America’s postal system is over two centuries old. It is as old as the United States itself, appearing in the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, enumerating the Powers of Congress, one of which was “to establish Post Offices and Post Roads.”). Over those two centuries, the system grew with the nation or, more often, ahead of the nation. Congress found the postal system a useful tool for ensuring the regular and certain distribution of information across the growing nation, and for encouraging settlement into the frontier.

The Post Office Department began using pneumatic tubes to carry mail underground between post offices and railway stations in 1893. The service was used in a handful of cities before being replaced by mail trucks after the First World War.

In order to fulfill Congressional demands and the population’s needs, postal officials faced an array of challenges to the system and its operations. To answer a particular need, officials:

• Reduced (and in some cases eliminated) newspaper rates, allowing newspapers to travel into the farthest American frontiers, keeping even the most remote American in touch with the latest news. In “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville called the postal system a “great link between minds” noting that it penetrated into the “heart of the wilderness.” In his address to the House on November 10, 1792, President George Washington noted that the post office’s transmission of newspapers and “the circulation of political intelligence” was critical and “among the surest means of preventing the degeneracy of a free people.”

• Contracted with a variety of individuals and companies to carry mail in new ways, or through new areas. Senator Burton of Kentucky emphasized the importance of postal roads to the nation’s future in the 1850s. Calling a proposed route from Missouri into the western frontier, “a skeleton of the future railroad.” In the 1920s, the Post Office Department’s establishment of a nation-wide Airmail Service system provided the backbone for the nation’s private companies who used it to build the commercial aviation system.

In October 2001, letters containing Anthrax were mailed to some U.S. senators and members of the media. Two Washington, DC postal workers died from exposure to the poison. Americans across the country admitted being wary of opening their mail for months afterwards.

The number of challenges faced by postal officials over the last 200 years spans issues from geography to technology, personnel, finances, mixed messages through Congressional oversight, and a raft of changing needs from the American public.

What do you believe is the biggest challenge facing the U.S. Postal Service today? 

Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines

By Nancy Pope, Historian

This is the first part in a series of blog posts that will look at the lives and work of America’s first airmail pilots. What you may not know is that the Post Office Department laid the groundwork for America’s commercial aviation network. From 1918-1927 the Department hired pilots, bought airplanes, and mapped aviation routes across the United States, all in the name of making mail move faster than ever before.

While the life of an airmail pilot was dangerous (pilots had an expected flying lifetime of 900 hours), it also had its share of humor and odd times. Pilots never knew what to expect when they set out on an airmail flight. They might be forced down in heavy snow like Hugh Barker in 1927, who then tried to get the Department to pay him back the $5 he spent to hire a man and truck to pull his airplane out of the snow and make a runway in the field.

Airmail pilot Hugh Barker.

All kinds of weather could frustrate the pilots. Pilot Frank Yager was annoyed when he couldn’t take off due to heavy fog. He decided to drive his plane instead, driving it across 35 miles of foggy prairie, taking off only lightly to hop barbed-wire fences along the way.

Or, maybe like “Tex” Marshall who had a habit of landing briefly (and against regulations) in an Iowa pasture to stretch his legs and have a smoke. One day, a bull in the field charged Marshall. Saved by the farmer, Miller was able to take off safely. But not before grabbing a rock and after takeoff he flew back over the field intending to chuck the rock at the bull. Unfortunately for Miller, he hit the farmer instead. It was the last time Miller stopped to stretch his legs while flying the mail.

    

Pilots Frank Yager (left) and "Tex" Marshall (right).

These early airmail pilots relied on ground markings such as rivers, roads, and railroads to help them find their way. While talking to a reporter in 1921, Harold “Slim” Lewis was asked his opinion of the airplane he was flying. Unimpressed with the craft and its capabilities, Lewis responded that the instrument panel was just something to clutter up the cockpit and distract your attention from the railroad or riverbed you're following.
 

Pilot Samuel Eaton.

A couple of pilots added humor to their reports. After Samuel Eaton crashed into a tree outside of Philadelphia in 1919, he filed a report on the crash that noted he had delivered the mail to a “branch” post office. In 1923 Dean Smith passed along this information on his recent crash landing in a telegram. “Dead sticked. Flying low. Only place to land on cow. Killed cow. Wrecked airplane. Scared me."

 

Owney: Item #42

Patricia Raynor
Loan Coordinator, National Postal Museum

Owney, the postal dog, has been commemorated on a U.S. Postage stamp.  On July 27th, the first-day-of-issue ceremony was held at the National Postal Museum.  Owney and many of his tags are on display in the museum’s atrium.

July 2011 also marked the 100th anniversary of the Post Office Department’s transfer of the contents of its museum to the Smithsonian Institution.  Among the objects transferred to the Smithsonian was the stuffed figure of Owney.

The museum keeps a permanent file for each donation or transfer of objects, called an accession file.  The file for the 1911-12 transfer is identified with the unique accession number “52985.”  Each item transferred through this accession is given an identifying index number.  Owney’s full accession number is 52985.274.  The original papers in the accession file identify Owney as item #42 in the section of “Portraits, Paintings, Photos, Mail Equipment and Miscellaneous Articles” (below).   Owney is described as “the dog that travelled on postal cars (with postal clerks) all over the United States and made a trip around the world.” His catalog card describes him as a “stuffed dog.”

Owney Catalog Card

Looking through the “52985” accession file is almost as interesting as reading about Owney’s travels while he was alive.  Owney continued to travel to expositions posthumously – most notably to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and to the Philadelphia Exposition of 1926.  The accession file includes correspondence related to the Smithsonian’s loan of Owney to the Post Office Department for the purposes of exhibition at the 1926 Sesqui-Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.  The correspondence even includes the packing receipt shown below.



Owney certainly was a well traveled dog and from the accession record, we can trace his Smithsonian history from his transfer to the “National Museum” and initial display at the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries building until 1964 when he traveled across the National Mall to the new Museum of History and Technology (now the National Museum of American History), where he resided until he moved to his permanent home at the National Postal Museum in 1993.  Owney’s traveling days are over, but we look forward to receiving more documentation about his life as a mascot of the Railway Mail Service and his history at the Smithsonian Institution.

For more information on Owney visit the museum's special Owney web page.