United Kingdom

Time Traveler | Cool Facts! | Technology | Post Explorer

Time Traveler
  The history of the Royal Mail service can be said to be as rich as a Shakespearean novel, filled with themes of war and romance. It helped deliver messages of war and even romantic poems between lovers.

When it first started in 1516, the mail service was just for the King, but a century later, it was introduced as a public utility by King Charles I. During this romantic era, the mail coaches were driven by handsomely-clad drivers who braved stormy weather and highway robberies, similar to the age of cowboys and Indians in Wild West.

From a mail coach network, it progressed to a railway mail delivery system in the 1830s. Trains were termed as "Traveling Post Offices" with onboard sorting facilities, so traveling time could be used as processing time. Gradually, airplanes took over and modernized the entire process. In fact, the Royal Mail established the world's first airmail service in 1919 between London and Paris.
A post office in Britain.

Cool Facts!
  A sad tale to begin with: The White Star Line's H.M.S. Titanic was one of the largest paddle steamships which carried mail across the Atlantic. On April 14, 1912, she sank deep into the icy Atlantic ocean upon impacting an iceberg, killing hundreds of passengers onboard. The dedication of the sea-post clerks onboard is to be remembered, for it was witnessed that some of them spent the last few moments of their lives struggling to salvage over 200 sacks of registered mail from the torrential waves rushing into the ship.

Back in 1635 (King Charles I's rule), it was the recipient who paid the postage, not the sender in England. Now your friend has more reason to fume at you for all the junk mail you sent!

12.5 million letters were delivered every week to British soldiers fighting against the Germans during the First World War. This massive delivery was done by 4000 soldiers of the Army Postal Service.

The Royal Mail received heavy criticisms over its latest editions of stamps which included Freddy Mercury and the Queen together. Mercury, a renowned British singer, had died of AIDS. The London Daily Mail described the stamp as "a typical stamp of vulgarity" and affirmed in sarcasm, that the public has "a lot more taste than the Royal Mail" and would not like to see its Queen "stripped to the waist and wearing spray-on red trousers" on British postage.

London has the world's only underground postal transportation system.  This train travels 60 feet below other underground commercial trains all the way around London, connecting to the central post office.

Technology
  Aside from a modernized postal technology typical of a developed nation, Britain is also another country that features Electronic Mail: a system which saves the user the hassle of purchasing postage, letter writing paper and envelopes etc. All the user has to do is type out the letter and send it to the Electronic Mail Center where the letter will be printed out, enveloped and affixed with the required postage.

Post Explorer
  Britain has a unique alphanumeric postal code that can be encoded by a postal code reader, which translates it into a series of dots by which machines can sort mail by. This process greatly improves the speed of the sorting process by up to eight times.
An interesting feature of the British address format is a preference for the return address to be on the back of the envelope. Some addresses also require for the "locality" of the address to be written in between the street name and the town's name.