Mail by cannon fire: the delirious proposal of the 19th century to compete with the telegraph and send letters with howitzers

At the beginning of the 19th century, the telegraph was in its infancy, but despite all the advantages it promised, its rabid immediacy and halo of even more rabid modernity, there was something about it that the poet did not quite like. Heinrich von Kleist. This new invention did not allow rolling up. The good man of letters, romantic to the core, liked long letters; and if something could be guessed in the young telegraphy, it was that she was not going to be very fond of nuances, subtleties and XXL letters.

What happened when one wanted to loosen the ponytail, literally speaking? What if you needed, for example, to send a package? In both cases, should he give up modernity and use the old mail system with carriages and post service? Why could the message of a bourgeois travel with the impulse of electricity and a poet had to settle for the one with the horse?

Do not –von Kleist thought—. There was another option: gunpowder.

Don’t say missive, say missile

If the telegraph was not valid for format letters Young Werther’s TroublesWhy not resort to shooting? Why not make them travel great distances a clean cannon shot?

With clear ideas —only ideas, yes— towards the autumn of 1810 Heinrich von Kleist did what he did best: he took paper, pen and wrote Entwurf einer Bombenpostan article published in the newspaper Berliner Abendlatter in which he suggested the advantages of sending messages with artillery.

His proposal consisted of storing the “letters, reports, annexes and packages” inside a howitzer and then shoot it with a cannon. The shells would be launched at special points, buffer zones where they could be picked up, passed to other guns and continued in a chain of fire.

According to von Kleit’s calculationsthanks to this method a letter — yes, even very, very, very long ones — could perfectly cover the 120 kilometers that separate Berlin and Szczecin or even the 290 that are far from Breslau in much less time than it took a horse-drawn carriage .

The proposal was little more than that, a curious article for history. there is even who points that—despite his calculations and the details he provides—when writing it, von Klei was pulling sarcasm. Whether or not it is so, what is undeniable is that today the poet is remembered, in addition to his genius with the pen, for his pioneering status “rocket mail”, an idea that others picked up after him and that over the centuries has had its golden moments. His goal: to use projectiles so that the missives traveled great distances in a short time.

Perhaps not to send tearful letters to the taste of 19th-century German Romanticism about the tragic human condition; but rocket mail of course it has a curious chronicle.

The mail with cannons was difficult, even dangerous, and it was not without a Vernian point; but it also offered important virtues beyond freeing writers from the exercise of stylistic synthesis imposed by telegraphy. If shells and cannonballs have something, it is that they are designed to circumvent barriers. That advantage meant that at the end of 1870, during the prussian siege of paris, a “rocket mail” patent was even applied for. And that same advantage was what allowed the system to enjoy what may have been its best performance.

Of course, far from France and Germany, thousands of kilometers from Europe, in the South Pacific.

There, in Tonga, they thought that rocket mail was a fabulous idea to solve one of their biggest headaches: how to get the mail to Niufao’ou, a remote island surrounded by reefs that forced ships to be handled with special caution when approaching their coasts. So complicated was the navigation around the volcanic island that for years the mail boats were dedicated to staying on the high seas and throwing metal suitcases with the correspondence overboard. To take them to the island they had to be reached with a clean stroke and dragged.

If we forget about the reefs, the tide, the storms and even the stalking of the sharks, that worked more or less well; but in the 20th century someone came up with an idea very much along the lines of von Kleist: Why not launch the cards from the boats with the help of Congreve rocketsprojectiles similar to fireworks and that had a range of more than three kilometers?

No sooner said than done. In practice, this was far from being a panacea: some were diverted, others burst, fell into the water… but he wrote another chapter in a chronicle that the German physicist and engineer would continue years later Herman Oberth in the 1920s.

Oberth was convinced that if the right devices were used, even equipped with secondary thrusters and capable of reaching high altitudes, the rocket mail could take up 20 kilos to more than a thousand kilometers away and dispatch transatlantic deliveries in just half an hour. With a similar philosophy, although focusing on the short range, Friedrich Schmiedl He even developed rockets that successfully flew in the Austrian Alps.

Needless to say, not everyone shared the enthusiasm of Herman Oberth either Friedrich Schmidl by rockets for letters. when in 1929 a journalist asked the ambassador German that this idea seemed to him, the diplomat resorted to all his tact and a pinch of humor: it would not be a problem, he assured, if it was previously shown that Oberth’s proposal would not represent any danger “to life, limb or property of American citizens.”

If there is a proper name in the history of “postman projectiles” next to that of von Kleist, it is, however, that of another German, Gerhard Zucker. And not precisely because of his success in the company. Throughout the 1930s Zucker undertook a personal crusade dotted with not a few failures and the occasional achievement—in which he reached 34 he relatively successfully launched a rocket full of fake cards from the Sussex Downs to the south coast of England—to demonstrate the virtues of service.

His balance was in any case so disastrous that in Great Britain, where his promises had had a certain echo, they ended up calling him a charlatan and a threat to public safety and they invited him to pack his bags and return to Germany. Whether they were right or wrong, the reality is that if Zucker and others like him could finance your experiments it was largely thanks to the support of philatelists interested in demo cards and commemorative stamps.

That old romantic dream of distributing letters with cannon fire or rockets would still write a few more chapters with as many protagonists, but by the end of the 1930s it had lost the strength of its early years. Interestingly, it was precisely then that he managed to one of his greatest milestonesone that would show that the pioneers had not been misguided with their shots —pun intended— and that, in the end, everything was limited to a matter of logistics and means.

In a display very much in the style of the Cold Warin 1959 the USA fired from the submarine the USS Barber an Regulus I cruise missile packed with letters that managed to land 22 minutes later at a naval station located more than 1,100 kilometers away, in Mayport, Florida. The test – carried out with a similar model the one seen on the cover of this article—was a real bombshell and made the US Postal Service fantasize about a future in the purest von Kleist style.

— Before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered in a matter of hours from New York to California, Britain, India or Australia by guided missiles. We are on the threshold of rocket mail. —came to proclaim the then Director General of the Post Office.

It didn’t go very well with the prediction. His prediction turned out to be as accurate as many of the postal rockets launched in Tongan waters or Zucker’s ill-fated missiles.

In the second half of the 20th century, airmail was already operating in much of the world, planes allowed letters to be carried quickly from one point of the world to another, even across the oceans, and, frankly, launching rockets in the middle of the cold war also had its risk.

Heinrich von Kleist’s old proposal had simply gone from being a magnificent idea for sending great letters to being the subject of great chronicles.

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