Victorian Era Postal Scale available @ Time’s Tin Cup !
This is a Victorian era brass postal/letter scale (balance scale), from the 1880–1910 era. These were instruments used to calculate letter and parcel weight for precise postage charges
Postal services have unique bits of history. For example, our mail for a short time was delivered by Rockets! One of the first successful deliveries of mail by a rocket in the United States was made on February 23, 1936, when two rocket airplanes that were launched from the New York side of the frozen Greenwood Lake landed on the New Jersey side, less than 100 yards away.
More attempts were tested in the mid 1950s using amateur rockets carrying mail interstate from California into Arizona.
In 1959, the U.S. Navy submarine USS Barbero had an actual branch office set up on their submarine for mail delivery using “Missile Mail”. They used a Regulus cruise missile by replacing the nuclear warhead with two Post Office mail containers and launched the missile to Florida.
This is a mail container that was used by the USS Barbero on display at the United States Submarine Force Museum in Groton, Connecticut.
