Postcard stamped in 1920 delivered 100 years later | Hacker News Reader

Postcard stamped in 1920 delivered 100 years later

fox17online.com

270 pointsbenryon134 comments

Years ago for my sister's 30th birthday, I did a fun project involving the USPS.

I wanted to send her the message "Happy Belated Thirtieth Birthday!", which is 30 characters, via postcards, one character per postcard.

I found 30 post offices in unique places throughout the U.S. (For example, I found a town that had the same name as her given name in Illinois. I found another with my name, etc.)

I used Zazzle to print a custom post card for each location with a picture of the location on one side, and a large block letter on the other. I just did a Google image search at the time to find photos of the location. Here's the image I used for "Truth or Consequences, NM":

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Truth_or...

I then hand wrote a message on each postcard that started with the block letter. This was because she'd be receiving the postcards one-by-one and I didn't want her to realize right away that a message was being spelled out. It would seem like a postcard I might send her from that location if I'd actually been there.

I also found a set of 50-state stamps the USPS had previously issued on eBay, and used the correct state's stamp for its postcard.

Finally, I round-tripped each postcard through its respective post office by mailing it inside an envelope addressed to the postmaster at that post office along with a note to the post master:

Dear Postmaster:

I am mailing my sister 30 postcards from 30 towns for her 30th birthday. I have enclosed a postcard, which I ask be hand-cancelled with a postmark from your town. To protect the postcard from machine cancels in its journey through the mail system, I have enclosed a stamped envelope addressed to my sister in which to seal and mail the postcard. Thank you very much for your time!

I wasn't sure if this would work, but damn if she didn't get all 30 postcards each properly postmarked.

I dropped them all in the mail in NC. Some went as far as Alaska and Hawaii.

She received them in Miami. I think she got the first one within a few days and the rest dribbled in over the next two weeks.

Edit: here they are after she received them all:

https://ibb.co/YQfx4jZ

Wow, this is a great story! Do you have pictures of the post cards by any chance?

And how long did it take her to realize what the message was?

I just added a photo of them all as received:

https://ibb.co/YQfx4jZ

It's been eight years. I think she texted me after she got the first few. I don't recall when she realized there was a message. I seem to recall they came in in batches. She's get none for a day or two and then get three or four. I also recall there wasn't a lot of correlation between how far they travelled and when she got them. It probably mostly depended how long it took the post master at each post office to re-mail.

My mother did something like that, but as a prank on my brother who was at the time in a military hospital. (This during the Vietnam days.)

What she did was got an atlas and identified every town whose name was at all romantic. (Things like Loving, New Mexico.) The postcards that she had come back appeared to be from random girls with as different as she could make the handwriting to be. It was all timed to show up on Valentine's day.

After getting two stacks of postcards from girls with cryptic messages like, "I hope to see you again" and "Visit any time", my brother got a reputation for being a total stud.

During my research I learned there's a Bridal Veil, Oregon which is a ghost town except for a post office, which folks like to use to send their wedding invitations.

https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/why-brides-grooms-are-f...

Sounds like Loveland CO where my aunt said they remail valentine's postcards.

To be fair Loveland is by no means deserted.

aw how lovely, best wingman is your mom

Can you please share your mom with me? Need some of that unconditional love in my life as well, thanks.

This story is so darn timely amidst the news of the post office lately. I had zero doubt postmasters would do this, postal workers seem to be the easiest folks to get along with. It'd be cool to do something for all 50 states (territories, too), but at this point, I doubt it'd work anymore.

Sweeter than sugar. That's awesome.

Saccharine?

That also works?

That's incredible! Really cool idea!

You've reinvented TCP using paper packets.

Is it really TCP though? Was each packet ACKnowledged? Would it be more UDP if any were dropped? Might also be a touch of SMTP, or maybe NSSMTP (No So SMTP)!

“Belated Happy Thirtieth Birthday” (Unless her birthday was late!)

Too late to fix a misplaced modifier now.

I didn’t understand the part where you included a second? addressed envelope to avoid machine cancels? If already canceled, why would it happen again?

This is why it’s so important to measure p99 latency rather than maximum latency.

This! Thank you for your service to category theory!

Comparisons like this are what is going to lead us into the next 100 years.

This user is not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Welch

How do you know I’m not?

To confirm though, I am indeed not that or any other mathematician and I can’t claim any credit for any contribution to category theory. I’m simply a programmer who knows a little bit about a few things, no one special :)

Well I suppose it's possible that your "about" line is completely fake, but in that case it sounds like you want people to go around thinking you're not him.

Going to the website on your profile made it immediately clear, but even without that confirmation, there's a much higher probability of you being a random programmer vs. a specific older mathematician.

true, percentiles are important for telling you how your system is doing and how typical users experience it. However, I contend that you should also measure max latency, just that is is less important for understanding typical usage. But seeing your max go crazy can signal that there is something else in the stack that needs work. Silly example that I hit: max was consistently 2hr on something that p99'd at like 1min and p50'd at 2 seconds. Dug in. The 2hr was a default tcp timeout being tripped due to some connections not being properly returned to the pool. Fix the pool logic and max times came down into the few minute range. This also lowered p99.

I agree with this, don't exclude extremes because a blog post or comment said it was bad, they can still be useful sometimes.

For general purpose web development response times, I like to refer to p99 and p95 for general healthiness. P50 doesn't do much more than make me feel better. Max has its uses, it can be a good timeout gauge as the commenter above me pointed out. If the RATE at which max values occur changes, you may have something worth investigating.

Good points.

To my point though, you mention that you noticed a "consistent" max of 2hr. Meaning the consistency was the interesting part. You probably consider this issue to be more important than some other hypothetical issue that caused, say, literally a single request to have a 2hr latency on Tuesday.

In other words, if you monitored over a period that was long enough to establish a statistically significant p99.9 or even p99.99 and then measured those percentiles, you still would have not only caught this issue, but also distinguished it from the other hypothetical issue. Monitoring your maximum and worrying about consistently high maximums might be a more effective mechanism, but in principle, you still care more about top percentiles.

In sum: top percentiles are more important than the max; but monitoring the max can still be useful.

Just like monitoring the arithmetic average ain't completely useless either. It's just far from the most important metric.

Like many office buildings in NYC, my employer's building had a system of air-pressured mail tubes. I understand (now) that they are kept in some cases as decoration, historical artifact, or due to the building being designated a historical monument (not sure if internals are covered (?).

We didn't understand that as first, and several colleagues and I put postcards and some expense reports into them. I can see the postcard arriving 100 years later!

This was Accenture, and at the time, original receipts were required. Luckily they made an exception on photocopied receipts when I explained what had happened.

Do you know where the mail tubes sent your postcards and expense reports? Did they end up in some basement or were they lost in the tubes forever?

Not sure, but I was told that traditionally they had air pressure pushing them along. But that without air, they get stuck not far from where you dropped them. We were on the 17th floor IIRC, so i imagine they are stuck somewhere close below.

Two of my offices have had these and at both, we've had engineers constructing insane devices to retrieve things they dropped in :)

There was also a discussion of mail chutes in old buildings a while ago, and many suffered from blockages (or being non-operational, as in your case). I could see someone finally clearing out a blockage during a renovation, then dropping the old letters in the mail. But the original article was a card written between families, so probably not in an office building. The flea-market theory from the article seems the most plausible.

I've lived in several apartment buildings that had a mail chute, from the top floor to the first floor, next to the elevator. I don't know how often it was checked for blockage; I think the USPS just picked up the mail form the box at the bottom of the chute.

I've seen some of those tubes at a Carrefour or Mercadona supermarket back in 2005 or something, in Spain. When they had too much many at the cash register, they sent the money to their backoffice. Super cool!

Nowadays in Germany they just take the cash register part with the money out and walk to the Tresor room, or have sort of wallets and a colleague delivers the money to there. Example taken from a Kaufland.

The response from USPS is what I expected. It's unlikely this was in the system for 100 years, but someone put it in the mail recently and the USPS decided to deliver it.

But doesn’t the postmark mean it arrived at the destination’s post office (although this was 100 years ago, so things may’ve changed)? So if it has a postmark of 1920, the USPS has it then. It is entirely possible it was delivered, then someone decided to drop it back in the system a few days ago.

Postmark is at the originating post office (usually). But what you say is still almost certainly true.

That seems almost certainly the case. It seems unlikely that any USPS sorting facility or post office where this could have fallen behind something would still be in use 100 years later (at least without extensive renovations/changes).

Improbable things happen frequently at scale. One possible scenario is just that this card got lost twice.

It could have slipped behind a counter at the original post office and been uncovered when that office was decommissioned 35 years later. Then it would have made its way to a newer sorting facility where either it could have been misplaced again or, more likely, been stuffed in a cabinet somewhere (as I doubt USPS was as adamant about delivering lost mail in the 1950's). That facility could easily be in operation until today - or decommissioned very recently.

No idea if anything like this actually occurred. But at 400M+ letters / day, USPS has the scale for unusual circumstances like this to be somewhat regular occurrences.

USPS was probably much more adamant about delivering lost mail in the 1950s. The level of service was higher, with twice daily delivery.

I never knew they did twice daily deliver, time to google up some more info!

http://500years.royalmailgroup.com/gallery/delivery-frequenc...

In the UK it was up to 12 times / day in cities!

To some degree, I'm sure it was a plot device but 19th century English novels often depended on rapid/same-day communications via letter at least in the environs of London.

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Penny_Post

That was considered standard then in London. Royal Mail even had its own underground railways in London.

It was more in some places. My grandma and aunt would mail letters like IMs in 1930s NYC.

I guess the telephone was able to replace a lot of those messages - and is possibly the reason they dialed back in the 1950s?

Remember the USPS is rumored to have recently dismantled hundreds of sorting machines. Entirely possible that some old mail was jammed in there somehow.

Also, cf. "Going Postal" by Terry Pratchett.

I had that initial thought as well, but there's no way those machines are anywhere near a century old.

The sorting machines themselves are certainly not, but the general infrastructure around them sure can be. The World's Most Mechanized Post Office video [1] was filmed circa 1959 and it shows a crazy level of industrialization in the DC facility. Conveyor belts were invented in 1901 or so and such systems can run for a very long time with proper maintenance - for centuries even, replacing everything but the frame. Given how slowly government usually moves, they must have built up to that scale over decades.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuvwoBb7gs4

the card is old enough to have been considered an antique in 1970, reinserted into the postal system, then gotten stuck in a "modern" sorting machine for another 50 years until ... TADA !!

GNU Terry

I do not have any data, but could easily imagine some post offices in small towns (say: Brandon, Iowa) have gone largely unchanged for a very long time.

If I can do that, then I'm going to get my tax return postmarked early and then just sit on it for a while.

“What do you mean you won’t pay me? Your requirement said postmarked by $date!”

The story seems to be either to get clicks or to intentionally make the USPS look bad, perhaps it has something to do with the election. I bet most people didn't read this part and some of them really formed the conclusion the mail got lost for 100 years in the mail system after skimming over this article.

Maybe as a joke, I doubt anyone would think that DeJoy is responsible for delaying mail for 100 years.

Meanwhile I have significant less mail, and on mail that had a stamp I see it took them a week to deliver it (this is local mail, not international). Never seen I such issues with mail as long as I lived here.

A lot of jokes on here about this being an improvement for USPS, or a distraction.

The truth is that USPS performance has improved dramatically over the last two weeks. You just haven't heard about that because there is very little appetite for good news. See here:

https://carriers.shipbob.com/#lp-pom-block-1909

Our company (bottomless.com, YC W19) uses USPS to do real time delivery and keeps a very close eye on arrival times. Our own internal arrival time data has normalized considerably as well.

It is still worse than it was. Yesterday I got local mail that was mailed a week ago and most of the time my mailbox is empty.

Their Informed Delivery service (where I can see what mail is being delivered to me) now says my address is not covered, when it worked for me 2 months ago (not sure when it was disabled, since recently I started worrying about lost mail).

Before it all started, USPS actually operated really well, there were times I got packages faster than through UPS (don't really use FedEx). Actually you can see that from your site they were on average 2 days, when typically everyone was expecting 3 days.

I worked in the mail room of a dorm while in college. Part of the daily routine was mindlessly marking things "return to sender," rarely noticing the postmark date. In one instance (this was 2013) we received a pretty beat up piece of mail that was clearly a Valentine's Day card. The postmark date was "02 Feb 1999." Being very intrigued, I found a CV that seemed to belong to the recipient (the CV indicated that they attended the university around the same time) and emailed them. They expressed their gratitude and mentioned that the card was from their now deceased grandparents. I of course forwarded the mail to them. I've always wondered what kind of journey that piece of mail had... I imagine part of it was stuck behind a desk somewhere.

In 2120, we'll be reading "votes sent by mail delivered 100 years later".

The post office will have time machine by then to get back and deliver on time and change the temporarily altered history. May be we already living in that alternative branch.

> May be we already living in that alternative branch.

You conjugated the future semiconditionally modified subinverted plagal past subjunctive intentional incorrectly.

I can't tell if this is a very elaborate grammar joke that I don't know enough to understand or a troll.

> I can't tell if this is a very elaborate grammar joke that I don't know enough to understand or a troll.

Neither! (Or, rather, it's DNA's very elaborate grammar joke that I stole.)

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~param/quotes/guide.html

I used to be in the habit of emailing myself links to read later. I once had an email arrive at my gmail account 3 months after I sent it. That's like what 1000 years in internet time? :D

Email is literally a store-and-forward technology!

There are a couple services that allow you to write a letter to your future self and get it delivered in X months/years.

futureme.org. I remember writing some about 10 years ago.

I had a substitute high school teacher one day who made us all write letters to ourselves, then sent them to us like 20 years later long after we'd forgotten about it. It was amazing!

Did you achieve all of what you hoped you'd do?

I think it would be a great self-introspection exercise to “respond” to this letter. You don’t even need a letter- just write to your past self and tell him/her what you’ve achieved, what you’re proud of, what you wish you’d done differently, what you’re unsure about for the future.

> In most cases these incidents do not involve mail that had been lost in our network and later found. What we typically find is that old letters and postcards – sometimes purchased at flea markets, antique shops and even online – are re-entered into our system. The end result is what we do best – as long as there is a deliverable address and postage, the card or letter gets delivered.

We got one 50 years old a few years ago, but it was a return to sender because the street no longer existed. It happened to be a Christmas card right around Christmas.

Last year I bought a house and moved out of my apartment. So far I have received 1) two stimulus checks for the two deceased owners of the house 2) funeral home bills 3) family photos they sent and got returned

The third one really got me sad, did you successfully sent it back to its intended recipient?

Beyond the great unknown?

How would you do that, burn them?

I think the correct word would be: sacrifice ;-)

Yes. Thank you. You are of course correct, and I appreciate you pointing that out to me. Make them holy and sacred.

I read it as the sender died (and they were returned to sender) but the recipients may still be alive somewhere.

You get your postmark from the originating post office. If I drop something in the mail here, the local post office marks the item (verifying & invalidating the postage), perhaps encodes the address in the barcode at the bottom (I don't recall whether that's centralized work or not), and sends it along its merry way to the destination.

The postmark is obviously printed by a modern (impact?) printer. Why the post office would accept a mailing with incorrect postage for current times is notable - maybe someone making the call just shrugged it off an allowed it to pass.

Sometimes they don’t notice that the postage is wrong, or even missing entirely. I’ve heard stories of people drawing “stamps” on letters to see if it would pass, and I know I’ve successfully mailed a letter without putting a stamp on it at all (by accident, and was surprised that it was delivered).

≥ Brittany says if she can’t find the family she’s gonna try and get it put into the museum in Belding.

Wtf sort of professional journalist writes "gonna" in an article on a news site?

Might be verbatim, but then again there are no quotes. This is indeed local news so actual writing and proofreading skills might be lesser than those of national outlets.

> We did reach out to the post office for comment and a spokesperson told me, “In most cases these incidents do not involve mail that had been lost in our network and later found. What we typically find is that old letters and postcards – sometimes purchased at flea markets, antique shops and even online – are re-entered into our system. The end result is what we do best – as long as there is a deliverable address and postage, the card or letter gets delivered.”

This is a good example of why eventual consistency is a weak guarantee.

Fun, but this is most likely fake. I.e. this card has not been laying at the postoffice for 100 years.

In this case it seems particularly clear: look at the glue markings in the middle of the card. This indicates this postcard probably has been sitting in a collectors' album for quite some time, before someone thought of removing it and pulling a joke.

This sort of thing happens all the time by people who post the card after it has been sitting in a collection for some time. Since it is a valid card, the post office will deliver it nonetheless. That's what they do! (Here's a Dutch example: https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/kerstkaart-na-ruim-halve-eeuw-a...)

Disclaimer: I checked this with an acclaimed philatelic collector.

It was addressed to Marty McFly!

I'm surprised I had to scroll this far for that comment. First thing I thought of with the headline.

I'm glad to see some improvement in the USPS

That got an audible laugh out of me.

> It was an old Halloween postcard

Are we sure this is not the plot to an upcoming horror film?

“We have been trying to reach you about your car insurance...”

I read an interesting article on the USPS. They aren't just a threat to the US elections, Europeans who live in the US and want to vote are screwed as well. Next day delivery is not something that is guaranteed in every country.

Sometimes I wonder what we've lost from not writing letters and using Facebook. Reading this, maybe not all that much, and the long-distance relationships we maintain have always been superficial.

I wonder, in 2100 will there be a UDP packet delivered from 100 years ago?

Nope, but there'll be a TCP packet that's been re-sending over and over for the past 100 years.

But we’ll still be using IPv4 so all good!

Am I the only one that think that might be a hoax? How is the post card be preserved for a century without significant damages to it? Moisture, mold and other nature situation would have destroyed it in a few decades. I really want to hear the back story of this story.

Also, the address still EXISTS after a hundred years? No rezoning, no town name change or street name change? Many rural houses built in 1920 would not have survive 100 years without major overhauls.

Is this a distraction story from USPS?

I like the scepticism!

But the fact that the story was posted by the recipient of the post card, to a Facebook Group, and then only hit the news after going viral means it probably wasn't done by a PR company.

Having done some of this "black hat PR" myself I can tell you that we don't typically cover our tracks that well.

We almost always plant bullshit by going to the news outlets themselves, or paying a blogger to put up an article on BI, Forbes, of HuffPo.

On a completely unrelated note, have you guys heard Amazon is hiring 33,000 new employees with a compensation package average of 150k? Just to help with unemployment during this time of crisis. Pretty cool of them to do that.

A blog post with your experience -even heavily redacted- would be interesting on the black-hat PR/public opinion swaying as a separate topic if you ever feel inclined.

ah, completely unrelated!

This kind of story is fairly normal in my 40-year existence. USPS has a strong culture to deliver the mail, come hell or high water. Sometimes old mail gets found, and they deliver it anyway, because that's the principled thing to do.

Of course, USPS has been politicized to an unreasonable degree, so folks are reading it in that context.

Wormate

I call shenanigans. There is a bar code on the bottom part of the postcard. It has 65 bars. This is consistent with the Intelligent Mail Barcode that was introduced in 2013. Prior to that there were different barcode standards, Postnet and Planet, but neither had 65 bars, the highest number of bars that Postnet had was 62, and they were short and long only. This barcode here has 4 types of bars: short, long up, long down, and long up-and-down; again this is consistent with the IMB code.

By the way, barcodes were introduced to encode ZIP codes, and ZIP codes were introduced in 1963.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Mail_barcode

A bit of a sensationalized headline. Just an old postcard, the postmark is recent.

> sensationalized headline

No, the postmark is 1920 according to the article.

See https://i.imgur.com/r8HqDc2.png

Can it not have multiple postmarks? The stamp at the top (which says 1920) and the modern barcode underneath?

The barcode is not a postmark, it's a machine readable version of the address

Nerdy nitpick: It might not be quite an "address". In the UK at least the machine readable information (either added during sorting or printed deliberately for a discount rate by bulk senders) indicates a delivery point a place to which this post will be in fact delivered, distinct from an address.

For example my address says Flat 7 of 60 My Street, and a friend lives at Flat 10 of 74 My Street. But my delivery point is a letter box in the front door of my home, whereas his delivery point is just a locked box at street level. Timed locks allow the postman to enter my building despite not having a key, so as to deliver post to my front door, whereas his building doesn't do this.

The company (almost everything in the UK is privatised because Tory ideology says this is a good idea even if it clearly isn't) delivering post owns very detailed maps of where all these delivery points are, because of course it needs its employees to visit all those points to deliver post, whereas it needn't care where in some sense an "address" is other than where the post is to be delivered.

Address (n): "a place where a person or organization may be communicated with"

Mmm. Where did you find that definition?

My (Collins) paper dictionary offers:

"The conventional form by which the location of a building is described" and nothing close to what you've suggested.

Wiktionary offers: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/address

"A description of the location of a property, usually with at least [...]"

Merriam-Webster:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/address

I see two postmarks. One stamped from 1920, and a second one sprayed on from 2020 (just to the left of the first one).

The second postmark suggests that this was possibly redeposited into the mail somewhere.

Post office says postmark is from 1920 the age and legitimacy of the origin of the card is correct. It was lost in 1920 in the mail or it was received kept for so long that it ended up being antique postcard that went through storefront market resold to somebody in modern times And they placed it in the mailbox.

I regularly get USPS notices of delivery at my house, where packages, according to the USPS delivery tracker, were "left in or around the mail box" or were "given directly to a resident" but they don't actually show up for hours or until sometime in the next few days.

It is far from inconceivable for a postcard to be lost in USPS-land and then years-later complete its journey, getting a bar code affixed. This would not be the first time this has happened. Other times, entire bags of sorted mail were lost and recovered decades later and then delivered.

There are no shenanigans here.

The remote barcoding system is used for hand written addresses and the post office adds them.

Typically when someone uses Inteligent Mail Barcode, they mechanize the address too. And if you are going for a spoof, you wouldn’t encode an IMB if you are hand writing the address.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Bar_Coding_System

Exactly. The barcode is added in the sorting facility, not at the post office and not by the sender.

The barcode is printed on the postcard in the sorting facilities after the recipient’s address has been read.

If the mail got lost on its way to the sorting facility, it was probably never stamped and therefore just had to be thrown into a mailbox again.

The barcode would have been printed this year when the postcard was processed in the sorting facility.

Anti Post office propaganda?

I ordered a package of plastic worms (for bass fishing) back in June. They were shipped from Texas on 06-21, and as of today (09-10), they still haven't arrived (Chapel Hill, NC).

Yet strangely enough, the postal service tracking system updated the status about a month ago, from "In Transit" to "In Transit - Arriving Late". Derp, derp.

Anyway, I've pretty much given up on them at this point, but I wonder if like 100 years from now, or at some other arbitrary point in time down the line, somebody who lives here after me is going to find a package of plastic worms in the mailbox...

It would be fun down the line to hear "Wait, Amazon used to sell physical things like this??"

I had a small package in customs in Chicago for three months recently. Seems to be the norm in these times.

Yeah, I mean, I could understand something coming through customs. But this particular package was something manufactured and shipped in Texas.

I did recently have a rather long wait for a book that was shipped from, aaah... I think it was either Germany or England. I think it took about a month and a half to arrive.

Of course I understand that COVID has had a major impact, but the one from Texas still annoys me. I mean, c'mon... over two months from TX to NC? Give me a break. :-(

Speaking of USPS: I shipped a package from Japan to my home in San Francisco, 3 months ago. The package arrived two days ago. I opened it... And realized the content has been "replaced" with junk books of (I assume) a similar weight of the original.

The content was a few ceramic plates, a few books, some tea - nothing particularly expensive, but these were items that we bought during our stay in Japan.

I hate this. I hate the person or persons that have done this. I pretty much feel my own person has been violated.

Also, knowing USPS, I'm certain that nothing will ever happen to these THIEVES, and that there will be no easy way for me to force them to open an investigation.

Sorry for the venting... But I somehow had to express this inner rage somewhere, and when I saw this thread I couldn't resist.

You would be surprised.

Call the postal inspector office in your area. They take mail theft very seriously.

Did you report it to customs? That's almost certainly where it got swapped.

Why assume it was USPS? It would have been handled by a number of agencies on its journey. The customs one mentioned by another person seems to be another plausible reason.

As others have mentioned - USPS is extremely interested in mail fraud and other crimes, arresting over 5k people a year. They handle reports like this all the time.

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