Today in History—June 8: The Day the USPS Redefined Airmail

Planes, trains, automobiles, and…missiles? Hey, the mail must go through.

In the history of the United States Postal Service—whose development mirrored that of the country itself in many ways—mail delivery has a surprisingly delightful and innovative story.

Notable examples of mail delivery methods include dogsled teams, the Pony Express, trains, trucks, planes, and, on this day in 1959, a guided missile. Just before noon, a Regulus I missile, holding two small blue-and-red metal containers of mail, was launched from the USS Barbero submarine.

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Its target was the naval station in Mayport, Florida. The missile was controlled by radio signals. The mail safely reached its destination in 22 minutes.

All 3,000 identical commemorative letters were wrapped in special envelopes to mark the occasion. They were all from the Postmaster General to government officials, including Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower and members of the submarine’s crew. (No junk mail made the flight.)

Regulus was the first operational U.S. Navy cruise missile, and it could reach altitudes of up to 30,000 feet. This delivery came at the height of the Cold War, and it’s likely that the Navy was showing off: Look at how precise our guided missile is, it can deliver mail! The message implied that the missile could also deliver a thermonuclear weapon with the same accuracy.

For this flight, the space that usually held a warhead was used for the containers of mail. Some of the letters that took this historic flight still survive as collector’s items.

As for the postal department, they had big plans for this method of delivery. Really ambitious plans, considering zip codes were still four years away and much of the mail was still being sorted by hand.

By all accounts, the delivery was a success, but somewhat unsurprisingly, mail-by-missile never caught on. The Department of Defense was not interested in its equipment being used—at considerable expense—to ferry civilians’ birthday cards from grandma. On top of that, the cargo capacity of a missile was far smaller than that of a standard postal vehicle.

Somewhat fortunately for humanity, particularly anyone living below a potential flight path, the future of mail delivery turned out not to involve nuclear-capable cruise missiles.

Famous Birthdays

1625: Gian Domenico Cassini—French astronomer who discovered the gap between the rings of Saturn

1867: Frank Lloyd Wright—American architect

1916: Francis Crick—British biophysicist who helped decipher the structure of DNA

1955: Tim Berners-Lee—British computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web