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"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Mail-Post Letter-Ball | ||
| A system of sending mail quickly from town to town via steam-cannon-powered hollow spheres. |
| In those days, the ancient method of conveying the post having been found much too slow for so enlightened a people, an ingenious scheme had been devices, by which the letters were put into balls and discharged by steam-cannon, from place to place; every town and district having a piece of toile melalique or woven wire, suspended in the air so as to form a kind of net to arrest the progress of the ball, and being provided with a cannon to send it off again, when the letters belonging to that neighborhood should have been extracted: whilst, to prevent accident, the mail-post letter-balls were always preceded by one of similar description, made of thin wood, with a hole in its side, which, collecting the wind as it passed along, made a kind of whistling noise, to admonish people to keep out of the way. |
| Technovelgy from The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century,
by Jane Webb Loudon. Published by Henry Colburn in 1828 Additional resources -
|
In 1810, German writer Heinrich von Kleist suggested a “bomb post” network using artillery batteries to fire letter-filled shells over long distances (like Berlin to Breslau). You won’t be surprised to learn that it was never implemented.
I enjoyed the juxtaposition of this extraordinary application of technology with the existence of carrier pigeons, which are also mentioned in the story.
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