Mailbox

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World map with countries that are marked with the colors of the customary post boxes.
Help us to fill in the colors of the countries that are still marked in gray.

The mailbox is used by the sender to hand over letters to a postal company . This conveys the letters to the recipient and stores them in his or her house mailbox or in a post office box set up for him in the local branch .

history

Stone mailbox , found on the coast of South Africa, with Dutch inscription from 1632: "Below are letters from Commander DV Lee and Vice Commander PC Roock with the ships ..., arrived here on April 9, 1632 from Batavia , departed on 15."
"Letter box" of the Prussian Post with rules of conduct, around 1850
Swedish mailbox from 1871
Blue country mailbox around 1885 made of cast iron with raised lettering in gold bronze, post horn and letter with seal. The emptying took place via the side door.
Around 1900, 27 Renaissance pillar mailboxes were produced by a foundry on the Lower Rhine

It can be assumed that containers, boxes or barrel-like vessels were already set up at the collection points at antique riding and messenger posts in order to keep messages that were to be conveyed until the arrival of the messenger or rider. A much older facility for this, however, is likely to be the fur iron and mailbag .

According to some information, wooden boxes, called tamburi , were placed in the churches of Florence in the 16th century , in which the population could submit anonymous reports for the government to warn them of attacks and crimes. Later these boxes are said to have been used by the mail carriers to also drop the mail that was addressed to the clergy there.

So these mailboxes are more the ancestors of today's house mailboxes .

The first images of mailboxes can be found in chronicles from the 17th century. The by engraver and publisher Christoph perverting out given Ständebuch , under the heading "The postilion and Bott" the Dutchman Caspar hatches a street scene at a small harbor on the background a house, probably a post office, is seen. On the outside wall of the house there is a letterbox in which a passer-by is throwing a letter engraved in copper. Luken certainly wanted to represent the conditions he was familiar with in Holland, where mailboxes were already in use at the end of the 17th century. Abraham à Staat Clara did the copperplate engraving for his book “Something for All”.

In 1633 a "stone mailbox" is mentioned, this is likely to be a forerunner that was used in seafaring. Seafarers have placed letters under stones in exposed places, for example when taking in drinking water and food on the south coast of Africa, in the hope that ships going in the opposite direction would take these letters home with them. It is known, for example, that the Dutch have set up a news exchange at the Cape of Good Hope .

At a certain place they use a hollow stone, "in which they put letters so that other Dutch people passing by may have news of their journey and journey, from where they started, and where they went and what they encountered" . Some of these stone boxes were used until the 20th century, around 1928 such a post stone was kept in the Natural History Museum in Cape Town .

Also in 1633 the first “Post Capsell” documented in writing can be found at the Haynische Stadttor of the Lower Silesian city of Liegnitz . From the second half of the 16th century, the city ​​of Wroclaw ran a messenger service to Leipzig . The city of Liegnitz on the route did not want to miss the advantages of this courier service. In an ordinance of March 16, 1633, the installation of this post box was ordered. According to the messenger ordinance of 1596, the Breslau messengers had to take the letters with them “without pay” and deliver them so that there was no need to charge a fee. Although this mailbox is only a side effect of the municipal messenger service Breslau - Leipzig and thus not yet part of a regular postal service, it should nevertheless be the first documented mailbox.

In Hamburg there was a “free city messenger service” since 1590 . In 1641 the city administration had a number of wooden mailboxes set up in the "Post House". These were sorted by destination and thus the first "directional mailboxes".

In 1653, Louis XIV granted the entrepreneur, city councilor and councilor Jean-Jacques Renouard de Villayer the right to set up mailboxes in individual districts of the Paris City Post Office. To this end, around 15 mailboxes were set up in the streets. From August 8, 1653, one could buy so-called “billets de port payé” for a sou in advance booking offices . The paper had to be "attached to, or wrapped around, or tucked into the letter or otherwise affixed so that the officer can see and easily remove it," as the regulation stated. The mailboxes were emptied three times a day. However, this postal service only lasted about eight years.

On the island of St. Helena , several letter containers can be found in 1658, in which consignments could be placed that were forwarded by passing seafarers. Such collecting boxes can still be found today on lonely islands or on remote sea routes.

A mailbox at the Prussian Post is first mentioned in 1766, it was located in the post office in Berlin. With the general introduction of letter boxes made of wood, the Prussian post did not begin until 1823 based on an expert report from the Oberpostamt in Cologne from 1818. This first letter box was a wooden box painted with white oil paint that was opened at the bottom. "Rules of conduct" printed on paper were attached to the front.

Mailboxes were introduced in England in 1809.

The Post of the Kingdom of Württemberg followed in 1830, followed shortly afterwards by the Bavarian Post . Initially, there were security concerns about mailboxes attached to the outside of buildings and the Post therefore introduced slot slots in post offices. Outside mailboxes existed in Bavaria from 1845 onwards. Only unpaid letters could be placed in the mailboxes, as postage stamps were still unknown. It was only with the introduction of the postage stamps , the One Penny Black in the United Kingdom on May 6, 1840, and the Black One on November 1, 1849 in the Kingdom of Bavaria , that letter boxes were set up everywhere in large numbers.

After 1860 the first mailboxes were made of cast iron , and around 1910 the first ones made of sheet steel appeared.

Colors and shapes

Various post boxes in the Museum for Communication Berlin .

Mailboxes have different international colors (see illustration of world map in mailbox colors) and shapes.

The mailboxes of the Deutsche Bundespost or now the Deutsche Post (see: Postbriefkasten (Germany) ), the Austrian Post, the Swiss Post and La Poste in France are yellow . In other countries, such as Australia , Denmark , England , Italy and Poland , the mailboxes have a reddish tone. In the United States and Russia , they are blue. Orange boxes are used in the Czech Republic and the Netherlands .

statistics

In a statistic published in 1877, the Seychelles, Curacao and the French area in Gabon each appear with a mailbox.

British Guiana at five. Persia at six. St. Pierre and Miquelon with a total of seven. Hong Kong with 12. The Society Islands with 30. New Caledonia with 35. Egypt with 36. Martinique with 37. Reunion with 67. Romania with 629, Japan 903, Netherlands 1481, Sweden 2827, Switzerland 4780, Belgium 5082, British India 5454 , Russia 6501, Austria 7827 and Hungary 2848, Italy 11,000, the United States of America 12,800, Great Britain and Ireland 25,082, France 45,479, above all Germany with 50,491 mailboxes.

These are distributed across the Reichspost area as follows: 41,705 post boxes and of these again 14,290 in places with post offices and 26,209 in places without post offices and 1206 in rail mail cars.

Country-specific articles

See also

literature

German-language literature
  • Federal Ministry for Post and Telecommunications (Ed.)
    • Handheld dictionary of postal services .
      • 2nd completely reworked edition. Frankfurt am Main 1953, pp. 173-174.
      • 1st supplement to the 2nd edition. 1956, p. 37.
      • 3rd completely revised edition. 1. Volume A-F. Berlin 1971, pp. 405-409.
    • »Throw in is enough: Post boxes since 1850« (illustration of eleven different post box models). In: Connections 500 years of post. P. 44.
    • Post book: Advice for customers.
      • 1982 edition, p. 17; 53
      • 1988 edition, p. 33; 56
  • Manfred Stephan: You can see numerous boxes hanging - a brief cultural history of German mailboxes. Transpress, Verlag für Verkehrwesenerlin, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-344-00163-9 .
  • German Society for Postal and Telecommunication History (DGPT), publisher and publisher:
    • Archive for German Postal History
      • Karl Dopf: The mailbox tells its story. Frankfurt am Main 1965, no. 2, p. 63.
      • Herbert Leclerc: The postal department of the Federal Postal Museum. Issue: 1/1973, pp. 13–34.
      • Herbert Leclerc: Small chronological table on the history of the mailbox. Issue: 2/1974, p. 58 f.
      • Ingo Hildebrand: Postbox as a crowd puller - Welcome to the largest mailbox in the world! About the successful appearance of Deutsche Post at the EXPO 2000 in Hanover. Issue 1/2001, pp. 59-62.
  • Deutsche Verkehrs-Zeitung , Berlin:
  • Archive for Post and Telegraphy, Berlin, Decker:
    • Beliefs about the usefulness of the mailbox 40 years ago. 1883, no. 18, p. 587.
    • The use of the mailbox on the railroad mail car. 1873, no. 11, p. 337.
    • The house mailboxes. 1873, no. 10, p. 304.
  • Georg Brandt: The mailbox - a piece of postal and contemporary history. Working Group Postal History and Philately Middle Rhine, Aachen 1989, pp. 594–647.
  • Josef Burkard: From the history of the mailbox. In: Franconian postal history sheets. Nuremberg 1965, no. 21, p. 7.
  • The first mailbox in a restaurant. In: German Postman. Berlin 1899, no. 40, p. 509.
  • The origin of the mailbox. In: Illustrirtes Briefmarken-Journal . Senf Brothers, Leipzig 1884, no. 21, p. 286.
  • Willi Finger: The post box had an anniversary - another way of reading it about its color. In: The Post-Activist. German Zentralverlag, Berlin 1949, no. 11, p. 180.
  • R. Pfeiffer, H. Paetzold: The box on the wall. Briefmarkenspiegel, In: Wochenpost. No. 6/1984, p. 18.
  • Neue Post, Berlin:
    • The first two-part yellow-blue street mailboxes. 1901, no. 9, p. 101.
    • From the history of the mailbox. 1899, no. 40, p. 476.
    • Double mailbox. 1903, no. 15, p. 220.
    • Enamelled mailbox. 1900, H. 36, p. 431.
  • Archive for Postal History in Bavaria, Munich
    • Johann Brunner: The mailbox in the service of the exchange of messages. 1943, no. 1, p. 293.
    • Wilhelm Eisenbeiß: From the “Boite” to the mailbox. 1975, H. 1, pp. 263-276.
  • Christine Kainz: On the history of the mailbox in Austria. In: Vienna International Postage Stamp Exhibition "Wipa 81" from May 22nd to 31st, 1981 in Vienna. 1981.
  • Michael Burzan: Everything in the box. In: Deutsche Briefmarken-Zeitung issue no. 17/2007, pp. 10–13
  • C. Seelemann: UK: New Mailboxes 1980. In: Collector Service No. 24/1980, pp 1812-1813.
International literature
  • Jean Young Farrugia, Anthony Wedgwood Benn: The Letter Box - a history of post office, pillar and wall boxes. Centaur Pr., Fontwell 1969.
  • Michel Lafeuille, Julia Eyme, P. Arette: Boîtes aux lettres - Saint Martin d 'Abbat, le village des boîtes aux lettres. Ed. Alternatives, Paris 2001, ISBN 2-86227-266-3 .
  • GA Glas, Henze Boekhout: Volle boel - het straatmeubilairvan PTT temidden van al het others. Stichting het Nederlandse PTT Museum, The Hague 1991, ISBN 90-73244-06-4 .

Web links

Commons : Post boxes  - collection with pictures

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Manfred Stephan; P. 7
  2. ↑ Mailboxes and mailbags. In: Herbert Leclerc: The postal department of the Federal Postal Museum. P. 30
  3. ↑ a b c The first mailbox and its historical development; in: DVZ, Volume 54, Berlin December 27, 1930, No. 52, p. 1033
  4. ↑ a b Karl Dopf, p. 63
  5. ↑ Concise dictionary of the postal system. 3. Edition. P. 405
  6. ↑ ZPF issue no. 2/1974; P. 61
  7. ↑ a b Manfred Stephan; P. 157
  8. ↑ a b c Mailboxes and mailbags. In: Herbert Leclerc: The postal department of the Federal Postal Museum. P. 29
  9. ↑ Illustration: City mailbox with instructions for use - Prussia 1850
  10. ^ Mint never hinged November / December 2009, p. 24
  11. ↑ Concise dictionary of the postal system. 3. Edition. P. 406
  12. ↑ From the history of the mailbox ; in DVZ, 1879, no. 22, p. 171
  13. ↑ Hint translation: “Watch out! From January 1st (2014), PostNL will no longer deliver normal mail on Mondays, only funeral mail and urgently needed medical mail. You can put the latter in this mailbox. Do you have funeral mail? Then contact our customer service "