Tikumu’s letter

Press, 15 July 1980, Page 14

Tikumu’s letter

Dear Readers, Last week I wrote about Rowland Hill’s campaign for postal reform. His Lea of using adhesive stamps at a uniform rate, of one penny for letters posted in all parts of Britain, simplified the postal system and gave people a more reliable service at a reasonable charge. The Government's Budget announcing that postage will be increased to 20 cents for ordinary mail may make penny postage seem like a fairy' tale, but the difference between the value of the humble-sounding penny of 140 years ago and 20 cents today may not be as great as it sounds.: However, the Post Office is not the; only agency responsible for the delivery of mail. In my letter box recently I found an unstamped sealed envelope. In bold writing on the bottom heft-hand side of the envelope was the instruction, “Deliver by hand.” Most of the householders in Christchurch would have received the same letter delivered by courier. Many of the circulars left in mail boxes these days are delivered by hand. People have always needed to make contact with each other — on a personal level as we do by word of mouth, letter or telephone, and in a wider sense of needing information from further afield. In the history of communications the postal

sendee as we know it is quite a modern development. The ancient people of the world contrived to send messages in a number of ingenious ways. The early Greeks trained runners to carry vital information. About' 490 8.C., a famous longdistance runner was sent from Athens to Sparta to plead for help for the Greeks in a war against the Persians. He covered the distance of more than 230 km on rough roads in about two days and a half. Another people with a well-organised system of communications were the Incas of Peru, who had posts stationed about eight km apart along their high roads. Government messages were carried at a rate of about 250 km a day, by a relay system.

The first well-known postal service on horseback was organised in Persia about 600 B.C. The fame of Roman chariot races has been revived in our time by a number of exciting films. It is not surprising that the first Roman Emperor, Augustus Caesar, developed a postal system with light swift chariots carrying letters for delivery in mail boxes, but not for the general public. Among the primitive forms of communication which have survived in various ways are beacons, smoke signals, the language of drums, and the oldest air mail of all — the pigeon post, said to have been used by Julius Caesar. In the middle of the last century German-bom Paul Julius Reuter brought the pigeon post up to date by using carrier pigeons to

link the end of the French telegraph with the beginning of the German system, a distance of about 40 km. Ten years later Reuter started a news agency in London, sen-ing messages abroad by telegraph. The name is often to be seen at the top of overseas news items. Today, Reuter’s service reaches countries all over the world, by computer and satellite as well as cable.

The postal system developed rapidly during the second half of the last century. In 1874, Post Office representatives from different parts of the world met together to discuss rates of postage and methods to be used in the exchange of mail. Today, a world-wide postal system operates by air, land, and sea.

The last 30 years have brought development in communications undreamed of a century ago, when people marvelled at reading news of world interest perhaps a day after the event.

Today, we can watch New Zealand footballers playing overseas, Wimbledon tennis and other interesting events while they are being played. By means of television, telephone, air mail letters, and fast news services we are in close touch wth people and events all round the world; and sometimes beyond our world, as in the memorable moments when Mr Nixon, the then President of the United States, spoke to three astronauts in the first moon landing by telephone, and communications reached the moon. Tikumu