Eighteenth Century English mail hacks (2001) | Hacker News Reader

Eighteenth Century English mail hacks (2001)

deadmedia.org

141 pointscamtarn36 comments

Worth mentioning that in those days the frequency of post deliveries was up to one per hour, 12 deliveries per day. That might be only in London though - elsewhere Id imagine it was probably less than that. But what's clear is that you could send mail in the morning and it would get there later the same day.

Until 2002 in the UK most people would receive their post before 9am in the morning (e.g. before most people went to work, I got mine at 8.15) and then a second post in the late morning or early afternoon. Nowadays there is just the one post and it arrives in the late morning (e.g. when most people are at work). In most parts you can still send a letter and it will get there the next day.

I read a story once of somebody sending a postcard from one part of the country to the other end saying that they planned to catch a train in a couple of hours, and would the recipient please meet them at the other end, etc. - the expectation is the card would get there in plenty of time before the sender themselves.

It's hard to believe. Whenever I mention this story to people and say it was all for the cost of a penny (the penny post being introduced in 1840), people say that back then a penny was worth so much more, we were able to invest in the infrastructure.

According to inflation calculators, 1p in 1840 is worth about 96p today. It's about 1/3rd more than a 1st class stamp today, and of course most postage is now paid for by bulk carriers (advertising), which is even cheaper.

There's some interesting stories to find in the economics of the UK postal system over the last 182 years...

I imagine that some of that will be going to pay posties more, and provide better services for them. Whilst I hope a good deal of the back office is automated, there is still a great deal of manual work. Modern employees have a much better standard of living, and benefits than those in 1840, and cost more.

A "penny" might have meant an old penny, or 1/240 GBP.

It certainly would have done.

In 1840 average weekly wage for a skilled man in his 30s was £2 according to the first link on ddg. A penny post would be about 1/480th of a weekly wage. If we assume that a skilled man in his 30s today would earn £40k, that would put today's stamp in the £1.50 range, rather than 65p.

Far cheaper today, despite being pretty much meaningless. It's no wonder people "hacked" the system, this was a time before phones, or even telegrams, but a time when long distance commerce and connected economies were beginning to become established.

[1] is a timetable for Sutton Coldfield in 1902.

It seems fairly reasonable that you could send a letter to Birmingham and have it delivered within two hours + travel time, but not to another part of the country unless you were lucky with the timings.

Remember, it was usually possible to post a letter from a station, which presumably gave it a very good chance of being on the next train.

[1] http://www.sutton-coldfield.net/rail/1902%20train%20timetabl...

If your letter from London to Edinburgh was posted at Kings X at 0800, and sent on the 0830, it may have arrived in Edinburgh at 1530 and arrived at the office at 1600. The contents could be "I'm taking the 1000 train, meet me when it arrives at 1700"

If you were to then catch the 1000 train, arriving 1700, that would give the recipient time to get to Waverley in time for the arrival.

Top Gear once did a race where they dropped a letter in a box in the Isles of Scilly, addressed to a house in Orkney, then climbed into a Porsche and tried to beat the letter to its destination.

The letter got there first.

I don't know about the UK but in France, big cities got 3 post deliveries per day at some point. I'm sure Paris got more at some point.

England is only approximately 400x300 miles. That's tiny. I'm not really surprised mail could get anywhere in the same day.

Here in the US, you'd be lucky if 1) your letter to someone across the same city gets there in a day (not even same day, but 24hrs) and 2) if the USPS doesn't lose, destroy, or deliver it to the wrong address.

You do know that private delivery services intermingle heavily with USPS, right?

FedEx and UPS both use USPS services (a lot of "last mile" work), and also both provide services to USPS (contracts to carry mail by air).

I fail to see how that makes my previous comment invalid..

A couple of years ago I had some paperwork I had to mail from a Seattle suburb to the state capitol in Olympia. Thought it would be a good idea to pay $5 and send it express, "overnight". Express came with an SMS option, which I signed up for, so for the next week I was getting texts about how it had made another incremental hop from one warehouse to the next...

The founders of Crumpler bags originally started a letter delivery service in the Adelaide CBD, but they were shut down.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/small-business/partners-have...

This is some really good context, so you could basically treat receiving letters like getting a very slow text message. Do you have an article or source regarding the post frequency?

Reminds me of stories of how, when the telegraph was common, people purchased code books in order to compress their messages. Not for security, necessarily, as many of the codes were public knowledge, but in order to save money as one code word could replace a whole common sentence. The telegraph companies eventually banned codes for that reason.

And just as with SMS the greediness of the telegraph companies probably only sped up development of alternatives.

> The telegraph companies eventually banned codes for that reason.

And as with today's spin machines, some claimed that the ban was to help their customers by reducing the likelihood of code related errors (mainly the effect of transcription errors when writing or reading back the telegram) causing significant communication errors. The past is not as alien a country as we sometimes think!

The equivalent of LOL or LMAO.

This reminded me of a TCP-over-DNS hack[1].

You could use airport wifi access points protected by captive portal to browse internet without paying by sending traffic through DNS requests.

[1] http://analogbit.com/software/tcp-over-dns/

As the link mentions, that software is outdated and Iodine [0] is a recommended replacement. I setup an Iodine server when doing some traveling and only had to use it one time, and it was painfully slow Not sure why it is slow, perhaps DNS packets must be smaller than a normal TCP packet?

It was still pretty cool that it worked, but I wouldn't want to use it regularly.

[0]: https://code.kryo.se/iodine/

Reminds me of a TV commercial from a few years ago: "Do you accept a collect call from we-had-the-baby-its-a-boy? No."

It was a very common hack when I was in school that, to call home, you'd make a person to person call and your parents would decline--saying the person you were calling for wasn't there--and then direct-dial you back.

[ADDED: And I'm sure there are people reading that comment with puzzled expressions who have no idea what I'm talking about. :-) ]

"person to person call"

Unlike a person to machine call?

I'm in my late 30s and I remember one other reference to a "person to person call" - I think it was a Simpsons episode from when I were the one making calls from school!

FYI for others, in the US at least a "person to person" call was an operator-assisted call in which you didn't need to pay if the person you were supposedly trying to reach wasn't available.

And a collect call meant that the party receiving the call was the one who paid. Collect calls at least still exist. I've used them when calling a credit card company from overseas.

If I remember correctly, making a collect call through your telephone company required talking to an actual operator who would set up the call and inform the receiving party of who was calling. The 800 number collect call services that eventually sprung up all used automated systems and they were perfect for this kind of abuse. You had about ten seconds to blurt out your message before the recording would stop.

I used to ride the Greyhound to visit my dad on weekends, and it would stop at a truckstop about ninety minutes away from my destination. At first I had to carry a pile of quarters to make the long distance payphone call to let him know I was on my way, until we finally figured out I could just blurt "Dad I'm in town xyz, be there in 90" instead of my name. Saved me a buck fifty or so every trip.

If you called 1-800-COLLECT, you would deal with an automated system, not an operator. I would use this as a free signal for when my dad should pick me up from after-school activities, but in my case it didn't require putting in a message, he just knew if he was getting a collect call from me to head out soon, and in any kind of emergency I would just use the change in my pocket.

There was a time in the early 90's when you could make a long distance call from a residential number and get AT&T to bill it to a third number without their consent. I guess the idea was that if there was a dispute they would go after whoever originated the call. What they didn't account for was the rise of COCOTS or Customer Owned Coin Operated Telephones, which were payphones connected to normal lines where all of the security was local instead of at the telephone company office. Long story short you could make long distance calls from a lot of payphones and bill them to random strangers.

For those wondering, it was a GEICO advert from 1995: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flP-o0ydkvo

("Don't cheat the phone company, save money the legal way.")

I think the GEICO one is the most posted on the Internet because I also remember the same conceit for one of the "direct access long distance" numbers (Sprint's 10-220) and for, I think, 1-800-COLLECT.

Here is a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JxhTnWrKYs

Fascinating! Probably as long as their have been systems, there have been hacks and abuses of them.

We should probably ask "how can this be misused?" whenever designing a system or rule.

I really like articles like this because it allows you to get a great glimpse of a different mode of living. And it makes you realize that a comfortable life is still very possible even without extremely advanced technology.

A while ago in high school I wrote a paper about lifestyle changes as a result of technology, and one interesting observation was the idea that, after 19th century standardization of time, people started becoming more rigidly strict to appointment times and work hours. Sorry for not including more sources here, but I also recall a contemporary news article that bemoaned how standardized time was forcing people to become slaves to punctuality, adding an extra source of anxiety that was a hindrance to the modern human.

Nowadays, if you show up 30 minutes late to brunch, you might really annoy your good friends. But it seems that this behavior is actually a very recent phenomenon.

Makes sense based on anecdotal evidence. There's a common complaint about westerners going to places like Kenya and dealing with 'africa time.'

C/F the x25 'minicall' Hack to do non call complete transactions in errorcodes which early ATMs were said to use... Because a non complete x25 virtual circuit was a cheaper bill than a timed held session.

Make the recipient the return address and whomever the actual address and forget the stamp. Post office will return to sender

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