Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
One of my main collecting interests is air mail special delivery. This combines two distinct services, neither of which exists as a distinct service today. All domestic, and most international, mail is delivered in the fastest way possible from the originating post office to the destination post office.
Back in the early 30s, when this letter was sent, air mail was an option. Domestic airmail cost (8c) four times the going surface rate (2c) in 1933, with the disparity slowly diminishing in the next 40 years. As you will see, air mail speeded delivery. Special delivery, which no longer exists, committed the post office to send a carrier to the addressee when the letter arrived in the post office, rather than waiting for the next scheduled delivery. The special delivery rate (10c) was even more expensive than the air mail. The nearest service today would be express mail, but that’s 33 times more expensive ($14.95) than first class (44c), compared to the five-fold differential in 1933.
According to the postal museum (http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/museum/1d_Pneumatic_Mail.html), large US cities used pneumatic tubes between post offices and rail stations. New York (and the then-independent Brooklyn) used rented Western Union tubes from the 1880s until the 1950s (by which time Brooklyn had ceased being the country’s fourth largest city and become part of New York).
Tubes could move mail fast, from between 35 and 60 miles an hour (not George Jetson fast, but as good as a polished bike messenger, and far faster than anything on foot or hoof), but they weren’t cheap to rent, and the USPOD never ran their own.
The first tubes were invented in the late 1860s, and built as a ruse to allow their developer to install pneumatic subways in New York. Neither subway nor mail tubes were ever constructed beyond several hundred feet. The first operational mail tubes were inaugurated in Philadelphia in 1893, with NYC following shortly thereafter. Chicago, the site of this envelope, began using pneumatic mail tubes between the main PO and Winslow Railroad Station, in 1904.
It’s unclear whether there was a tube delivery station inside the Stevens Hotel, the destination of this cover, or whether the tube ran from Air Mail Field to the Central Tube Station, but at some point it entered the tubes. It also flew, from Narberth, Pennsylvania, to Chicago. Narberth is not far from Philadelphia.
According to googlemaps, it’s a distance of at least 752 miles, travelling over the interstate system, for about 14 hours. So, this makes it amazing that this letter travelled more than 700 miles, through Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Toledo, starting in Narberth at 9 AM and arriving in Chicago the same day, at 4 PM. It’s still 752 miles, but only 7 hours. And I’m guessing that Narberth wasn’t a terminus for air mail flights, meaning it had to travel from Narberth to Philadelphia before boarding a plane.
Even more amazing is that it was then delivered, from the Air Mail field in Chicago to what I presume to be the main post office, where it entered the pneumatic system. I don’t know enough about the pneumatic system in Chicago (and that’s true for all cities) to know whether there was tube to the Stevens Hotel or not. If so, it makes the delivery time from air mail field, where it receives hand cancels at 4 PM and 7 PM, to the Stevens Hotel, at 7.21 a nice feat of pneumatic engineering. Otherwise, at some point, a postal messenger would have picked it up and delivered it to the Hotel. I think the latter is the case because you see the notation “fee claimed in Chicago,†which I take to indicate that the special delivery service was provided there.
In any case, in less than 10 and half hours, it made it across three states and is delivered to the addressee’s doorstep.
For more on the Stevens Hotel, where this letter ended, please see http://juicyheads.com/link.php?PLJJNRHQ
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After reading several posts about covers I have a whole new appreciation for them and they have added an element of interest in the hobby I never considered before.
I have a question though on collecting covers. How do you store/preserve them? I have a small box of old letters and the envelope paper is brittle. I was thinking about scanning them into a digital file then removing the stamps and discarding the rest.
Mike
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Nooooooooooo! Keep the cover intact! Don't soak the staaaaaamp offfffffffff....
The whole idea of covers is that they are artifacts. The stamps may be significant, but in most cases are not. Often, in fact, they are damaged and not very collectable as stamps. But the stamps, in conjunction with postmarks, cancellations, handwritten data, the address, the return address, various etiquettes, labels, cinderellas, etc. often create a unique item that may represent the time and circumstances under which it was mailed and travelled through the postal stream.
Here's an example:
Remove the stamps and destroy the cover and you've got a a fairly ordinary stamp worth less than 50 cents in good condition.
Keep the cover and do some research, and you end up with an artifact representative of the Chinese diaspora of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; of the sociology of Vancouver, Vancouver's Chinatown, and Silver City, New Mexico; of murder and miscarriage of justice, and of airmail and ground mail routes in North America in the 1940s.
As you can tell, I've done a lot of research on this cover. You can read more about this cover on my web page, "Loy Kee writes to Jing-Zun Pan".
Just because this particular cover has a story to tell doesn't mean, of course, that all covers have equally interesting stories. Many covers, even old ones, are pretty much silent about their histories, and the world will not be a worse place if their stamps are soaked off and the envelopes recycled. Some covers appear to be unique but in fact have philatelic origins, and their nearly identical brethren can be found in dealers' cover stocks. My rule of thumb is this: Unless I can prove that a cover has no more significance than the stamp it's franked with, then it remains intact. Remember that stamps on cover are much less common than the same stamps which have been soaked off their covers.
Bob
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Mike, couldn't agree more with Bob. Not all covers are created equal, but unless there's a reason to destroy a cover, DON'T.
Your covers still have their correspondence, and as most cover collectors will attest, that's rare in itself. Without seeing them, there's no way to know whether their postal history is important, but with contents, well, they automatically provide some history that most covers just cant'.
I have been saving the articles I write up and including them in folders with the covers (and filing them with their normal rates or services, etc.), so i'm all in favor of digitizing my stuff, but as a complement to, rather than substitute for, them. If a cover is valuable to warrant a scan, using Bob's methodology, i'd say it should be saved intact.
why not do as Bob suggests, and start researching the correspondents, the rates, the times, etc. and see what happens. We'll all benefit from the resulting article and images.
David
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I thought I would add what might be self-evident: once a stamp is removed from an envelope, it can't be replaced; and once an envelope is separated from its contents, it's unlikely to be re-united. We can use those as starting points.
If a collector really only wants the stamps and not the cover and correspondence, it might be useful to either offer them up as auction lots; or offer to trade the covers for similar stamps. I have occasionally offered to trade stamps for covers and make up the difference in shipping costs.
David
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Pneumatic tubes
One of my main collecting interests is air mail special delivery. This combines two distinct services, neither of which exists as a distinct service today. All domestic, and most international, mail is delivered in the fastest way possible from the originating post office to the destination post office.
Back in the early 30s, when this letter was sent, air mail was an option. Domestic airmail cost (8c) four times the going surface rate (2c) in 1933, with the disparity slowly diminishing in the next 40 years. As you will see, air mail speeded delivery. Special delivery, which no longer exists, committed the post office to send a carrier to the addressee when the letter arrived in the post office, rather than waiting for the next scheduled delivery. The special delivery rate (10c) was even more expensive than the air mail. The nearest service today would be express mail, but that’s 33 times more expensive ($14.95) than first class (44c), compared to the five-fold differential in 1933.
According to the postal museum (http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/museum/1d_Pneumatic_Mail.html), large US cities used pneumatic tubes between post offices and rail stations. New York (and the then-independent Brooklyn) used rented Western Union tubes from the 1880s until the 1950s (by which time Brooklyn had ceased being the country’s fourth largest city and become part of New York).
Tubes could move mail fast, from between 35 and 60 miles an hour (not George Jetson fast, but as good as a polished bike messenger, and far faster than anything on foot or hoof), but they weren’t cheap to rent, and the USPOD never ran their own.
The first tubes were invented in the late 1860s, and built as a ruse to allow their developer to install pneumatic subways in New York. Neither subway nor mail tubes were ever constructed beyond several hundred feet. The first operational mail tubes were inaugurated in Philadelphia in 1893, with NYC following shortly thereafter. Chicago, the site of this envelope, began using pneumatic mail tubes between the main PO and Winslow Railroad Station, in 1904.
It’s unclear whether there was a tube delivery station inside the Stevens Hotel, the destination of this cover, or whether the tube ran from Air Mail Field to the Central Tube Station, but at some point it entered the tubes. It also flew, from Narberth, Pennsylvania, to Chicago. Narberth is not far from Philadelphia.
According to googlemaps, it’s a distance of at least 752 miles, travelling over the interstate system, for about 14 hours. So, this makes it amazing that this letter travelled more than 700 miles, through Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Toledo, starting in Narberth at 9 AM and arriving in Chicago the same day, at 4 PM. It’s still 752 miles, but only 7 hours. And I’m guessing that Narberth wasn’t a terminus for air mail flights, meaning it had to travel from Narberth to Philadelphia before boarding a plane.
Even more amazing is that it was then delivered, from the Air Mail field in Chicago to what I presume to be the main post office, where it entered the pneumatic system. I don’t know enough about the pneumatic system in Chicago (and that’s true for all cities) to know whether there was tube to the Stevens Hotel or not. If so, it makes the delivery time from air mail field, where it receives hand cancels at 4 PM and 7 PM, to the Stevens Hotel, at 7.21 a nice feat of pneumatic engineering. Otherwise, at some point, a postal messenger would have picked it up and delivered it to the Hotel. I think the latter is the case because you see the notation “fee claimed in Chicago,†which I take to indicate that the special delivery service was provided there.
In any case, in less than 10 and half hours, it made it across three states and is delivered to the addressee’s doorstep.
For more on the Stevens Hotel, where this letter ended, please see http://juicyheads.com/link.php?PLJJNRHQ
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re: Airmail Special Delivery and Pneumatic Tubes
After reading several posts about covers I have a whole new appreciation for them and they have added an element of interest in the hobby I never considered before.
I have a question though on collecting covers. How do you store/preserve them? I have a small box of old letters and the envelope paper is brittle. I was thinking about scanning them into a digital file then removing the stamps and discarding the rest.
Mike
Login to Like
this post
re: Airmail Special Delivery and Pneumatic Tubes
Nooooooooooo! Keep the cover intact! Don't soak the staaaaaamp offfffffffff....
The whole idea of covers is that they are artifacts. The stamps may be significant, but in most cases are not. Often, in fact, they are damaged and not very collectable as stamps. But the stamps, in conjunction with postmarks, cancellations, handwritten data, the address, the return address, various etiquettes, labels, cinderellas, etc. often create a unique item that may represent the time and circumstances under which it was mailed and travelled through the postal stream.
Here's an example:
Remove the stamps and destroy the cover and you've got a a fairly ordinary stamp worth less than 50 cents in good condition.
Keep the cover and do some research, and you end up with an artifact representative of the Chinese diaspora of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; of the sociology of Vancouver, Vancouver's Chinatown, and Silver City, New Mexico; of murder and miscarriage of justice, and of airmail and ground mail routes in North America in the 1940s.
As you can tell, I've done a lot of research on this cover. You can read more about this cover on my web page, "Loy Kee writes to Jing-Zun Pan".
Just because this particular cover has a story to tell doesn't mean, of course, that all covers have equally interesting stories. Many covers, even old ones, are pretty much silent about their histories, and the world will not be a worse place if their stamps are soaked off and the envelopes recycled. Some covers appear to be unique but in fact have philatelic origins, and their nearly identical brethren can be found in dealers' cover stocks. My rule of thumb is this: Unless I can prove that a cover has no more significance than the stamp it's franked with, then it remains intact. Remember that stamps on cover are much less common than the same stamps which have been soaked off their covers.
Bob
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Auctions
re: Airmail Special Delivery and Pneumatic Tubes
Mike, couldn't agree more with Bob. Not all covers are created equal, but unless there's a reason to destroy a cover, DON'T.
Your covers still have their correspondence, and as most cover collectors will attest, that's rare in itself. Without seeing them, there's no way to know whether their postal history is important, but with contents, well, they automatically provide some history that most covers just cant'.
I have been saving the articles I write up and including them in folders with the covers (and filing them with their normal rates or services, etc.), so i'm all in favor of digitizing my stuff, but as a complement to, rather than substitute for, them. If a cover is valuable to warrant a scan, using Bob's methodology, i'd say it should be saved intact.
why not do as Bob suggests, and start researching the correspondents, the rates, the times, etc. and see what happens. We'll all benefit from the resulting article and images.
David
Login to Like
this post
Auctions
re: Airmail Special Delivery and Pneumatic Tubes
I thought I would add what might be self-evident: once a stamp is removed from an envelope, it can't be replaced; and once an envelope is separated from its contents, it's unlikely to be re-united. We can use those as starting points.
If a collector really only wants the stamps and not the cover and correspondence, it might be useful to either offer them up as auction lots; or offer to trade the covers for similar stamps. I have occasionally offered to trade stamps for covers and make up the difference in shipping costs.
David
Login to Like
this post