Don’t you just hate when you get on a plane for a long flight and there is some screaming baby next to you? If only there was an easier way to get babies places, like—hear me out—maybe mailing them across the country?
Well, that’s what people actually did in the early 1900s. Today the Washington Post writes that in the earliest days of the United States Postal Service, packages were capped at four pounds. But in 1913, when the parcel service began, people began to mail each other all sorts of weird things, like their kids.
The first case was reportedly in 1913, when Mr. and Mrs. Jesse Beauge of Glen Este, Ohio, sent their 10-pound son to his grandmother’s house a mile away. For just 15 cents postage and $50 insurance—god forbid anything happened (and what would?!)—May Pierstoff was mailed in “an Idaho railway mail car in 1914 with the appropriate stamps stuck to her traveling coat” and she got a picture book story out of her ordeal.
If you’re thinking that these kids were packed tightly into little brown boxes with bubble wrap and masking tape, you’d be wrong, even though that is a hilarious image. Rather, the kids were swaddled in bundles carried by the mailman or went as his companions, so it honestly sounds like a pretty sweet way to travel.
In 1914 the postmaster ruined the whole thing and ruled that nobody could send humans through the mail. So I guess you’ll just have to make room for babies on your flights!
