Updated on January 13, 2022
Humans have been using postal services for shipment delivery for hundreds of years. But there are enough attempts in history to ship something unusual and non-standard.
Children
Officially, the state post office in the United States began operating in 1913. In the first years of work, clients experimented with the possibilities of the organization with might and main. So it got to the point that enterprising parents wanted to send their son to his grandmother by parcel (calculating that, taking into account the small weight of the child, it would be more economical than buying a train ticket). And this was not an isolated case. But in 1915, the government banned sending people by post.
A slave
There’s a case when Henry Brown, who was in slavery, sent himself by post to a place where there was no slavery, namely Philadelphia.
A friend who worked at the post office helped with an escape. In March 1849, the runaway climbed into a wooden box, and a 90-kilogram parcel successfully reached Philadelphia.
Brown, who escaped from slavery, attracted so much attention to his story that, after a while, the US government issued a law on runaway slaves, and no one could repeat Henry’s success after that.
Live cat
From 1897 to 1953, the New York Main Post Office operated a complex system of pneumatic tubes through which letters flew at speeds up to 56 kilometers per hour. As a demonstration that the system works, instead of papers, they used a real cat along with the Bible at the ceremony.
Thousands of creepy letters
Residents of a small English town received thousands of letters from an anonymous addressee with various accusations. All the letters were written in block letters.
These messages began to arrive after a mysterious incident on the outskirts of the town. People believe that the author of the letters is the person accused of attempted murder after that tragedy. The accused himself did not admit his guilt while in prison.
A drone for 350 thousand dollars
An American college student ordered a bench press. After a while, he received a fairly large package. But after unpacking it, he found another box. Inside there was an object resembling an airplane. The agitated student shared a photo of the device on Reddit, and it turned out that he somehow received a drone aircraft vehicle worth $350,000.
The sender of the unusual package was never found.
Bricks
Bricks were sent to banks abusing annoying advertising or spammers. According to that time’s rules, a letter with an envelope for a reply had to be delivered regardless of what it’s attached to. Moreover, the parcel was paid for by the sender, and the weight of the brick is not small.
Skis, a hammer, and a box of rotten fish as part of an “Experiment”
In 2000, a group of students decided to experiment by sending several strange items by mail (there are rules according to which the forwarding of certain categories of things is prohibited).
They sent skis, a hammer, a box of rotten fish, a human tooth, a helium balloon, a real coconut, and several other interesting things.
According to the experiment results, it turned out that 18 of the 28 items sent reached the recipients.
