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Before the 17th cent., royal ministers had their own king's messengers, but private persons sent letters through servants or friends. Henry VIII had a master of the posts in 1512 but he served only the government. The first attempt at a public system was in 1635 when a service was established to important towns, carrying letters at 2 pence per sheet per 80 miles. In 1680 a London penny post was started and soon taken over by the government; penny posts were established in large provincial towns in the later 18th cent. Two 18th-cent. developments were Ralph Allen's scheme of cross-country services, followed by John Palmer's introduction of scheduled mail coaches. Rowland Hill's plan of penny postage was adopted in 1840 in the teeth of powerful opposition: prepayment through stamps was introduced and there was no extra charge for mileage. It was followed in the 1850s by the introduction of pillar boxes (a suggestion of Anthony Trollope). The services offered by post offices proliferated—the introduction of telegrams delivered by messenger boys; the establishment by Gladstone in 1861 of the Post Office Savings Bank; and the beginning of parcel post in 1883. The start of the use of post offices for a variety of welfare payments was the decision in 1908 to deliver old-age pensions through them.
An office or building where letters and parcels are received and sorted, and from where they are distributed and dispatched to various destinations.
The first organized system of post offices in America was created by the British Parliament in 1711, but as early as 1639 there was a post office in Boston. The mails were carried over a system of post roads; the New York City–Boston service was established in 1672. Postage stamps were first used in the United States in 1847; other developments were the registering of mail (1855), city delivery (1863), money orders (1864), and penny postcards (1873). Special-delivery service started in 1885, rural delivery in 1896, the postal savings system in 1911 (discontinued 1966), and parcel post in 1913. Mail was transmitted to the West Coast by the pony express of 1860–61. Mail service by railroad was instituted in 1862, and airmail in 1918.
In the United States, postal service is under the direction of the U.S. Postal Service, having been reorganized in 1970 from the old Post Office Department. It is governed by an 11-member board, who choose a Postmaster General; since the reorganization, the Postmaster General is no longer a member of the cabinet. A separate five-member commission is charged with reviewing and approving rate changes proposed by the board. The U.S. Postal Service operates as an independent, self-supporting agency within the government.
The Universal Postal Union (UPU), which facilitates the exchange of mail among nations, was established after the International Postal Convention of 1874; the UPU is now a specialized agency of the United Nations. Many governmental postal services have special divisions for serving stamp collectors (see philately). Since the early 1970s in the United States, private shipping services, such as Federal Express (now FedEx) and United Parcel Service (UPS), have competed for special services, and by the 1990s electronic services such as fax (see facsimile) and electronic mail also cut into the postal service's business.
Bibliography
See F. G. Kay, Royal Mail (1951); F. Staff, The Transatlantic Mail (1957); C. H. Scheele, A Short History of the Mail Service (1970); G. Cullinan, The United States Postal Service (rev. ed. 1973); J. H. Bruns, Great American Post Offices (1998); R. R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1998).
A post office is a facility authorized by a postal system for the posting, receipt, sortation, handling, transmission or delivery of mail.[1] Post offices offer mail-related services such as post office boxes, postage and packaging supplies. In addition, some post offices offer non-postal services such as passport applications and other government forms, money orders, and banking services.
Post offices also rent post-office boxes to people and businesses who prefer not to have mail delivered to their home or office, or who live or stay at addresses to which mail delivery is not available.
The back rooms of a post office are where mail is processed for delivery. Mail may also be processed in other post offices that are not open to the general public.
The Post Office is a retail company in the United Kingdom; formerly part of the postal service Royal Mail, it became a separate entity in 1981.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
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 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| British History. A Dictionary of British History. Copyright © 2001, 2004 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Architecture. McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Architecture and Construction. Copyright © 2003 by McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ Read more |
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| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Post office". Read more |
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