November 28, 2019 • 21 mins
How far did the components of your phone travel to land in the palm of your hand? Nowadays, even the most mundane items can come from half a world away. This wasn't always the case -- join the guys as they explore the weird, weird world of shipping in this special two-part episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Don't call it a comeback,
we'll actually do, because we are back with part two
on the weird, weird, weird history of shipping things in
the US. If you have not listened to part one
for for you know, for your sake, we're just looking
out for you, go ahead and pause this, Go play
part one. It's worth it. We'll wait. I'm Noah by
(00:48):
the way, Oh that's right, and I am Ben Boland.
We are joined as always with our super producer, Casey Pegroom,
and we are officially halfway through the very strange story
of how things it from point A to point B
and all the weird stops they make along the way.
How about we joined that already in progress. The way
that Atlas Obscura phrases is pretty funny. The author says,
(01:11):
the owners of the Central Pacific Railroad created a company
solely for the purpose of screwing with Wells Fargo, which
which I always love it when people interject a little
bit of petty humanity into these stories. This story is
full of petty humanity for sure. Now, yeah, yeah, we've
all been to the we've all had this ship something somewhere,
(01:31):
so you're right, they do. They do decide to purchase
this company, and they continue being this huge force in
the package industry until World War One. Because during World
War One, the US government forces all of these postage services,
all the express industry companies to combine into a single
(01:55):
monolithic thing and they nationalize it and they call this
the Railway Express Agency. Yeah, and this is specifically so
the government could have an easier time of shipping wartime
necessities um such as rations, human beings and all of
the other trappings and accoutrement of of war. And as
(02:15):
we know in history, you know, all good things must
come to an end um and disruptive technology is just
the order of the day. And in nineteen seventy five,
this monolith um collapsed as well, and it's because of
motor vehicles. They they just became much more efficient for
shipping things because you weren't bound to literal routes laid
(02:36):
out on tracks, and you could just be a lot
more nimble in shipping stuff. And that's when we start
to see Wells far ago completely abandoning uh shipping and
receiving in favor of exclusively their banking operations, which again
they were happening in tandem. The banks were kind of
part and parcel, if you'll excuse the pun. You don't
have to um to the shipping business. Because of the time,
(03:00):
they were already handling these assets that made sense to
them to be able to just invest them and hold
them for people in all of these various wells fargo locations.
So they give that up and this is when we
start to see um a lot more individual companies pop
up startup companies at the time, for lack of a
better term, like ups and FedEx. Yeah, we have to
(03:20):
remember that while all these swells and shipping tycoons were
putting their stamp on history. Uh, we have to remember
that the Federal Post Office at this time was a
lot more like a regulatory agency than something that actually
shipped packages and letters. So while all this is happening,
(03:43):
and let's let's jump back in time here in the
early days of the Federal Post Office, it wasn't a
shipping company. It was more of a regulatory agency. They
made rules about how packages and letters should be sent.
Until that is, several big changes occur, which us to
the current day. The first was the Rural Free Delivery Act.
(04:05):
There the establishment of Rural Free Delivery in eight This
was huge from more than half of the country because
half of the country lived in rural areas and now
they could get mail directly sent to them instead of
having to go to you know, the county seat to
find the post office. And in nineteen thirteen there was
(04:26):
another big change. It was something called parcel post. Yeah,
parcel post, it's to send. I mean, it's as simple
as it became much more cost effective to ship things,
maxing out at fifty pounds at the time. In fact,
it was so efficient that, as is referenced in this
Atlas Obscure article, uh, college students would ship their dirty
(04:49):
laundry home and the especially made metal boxes so their
parents could do their laundry for them and then ship
it back. And it was more cost effective to do
that than to go to a laundry matter hire somebody
to to wash their clothes for them, which is crazy, right.
You have to wonder was the mail just that cheap
(05:09):
or were laundry mats themselves incredibly expensive. There's so much
weird stuff that's been mailed over over the years. We
can we can laundry list a few towards the end,
but we should mention just an honorable mention, of course,
to Charlotte May Piersdorff, who was literally mailed from Grangeville
to Lewiston, Idaho for about fifty three cents. Her trip
(05:34):
only took a few hours. This was legal at the
time because she was under the weight limit. I hope
they poked some holes in the box for her. She
did make it, she did survive, yes, so maybe she
was practicing some sort of deep meditation to restrict your breathing.
I have you ever seen that Malcolm in the middle
episode where the older brother whose name I'm forgetting, what's
(05:55):
his name, doesn't matter, he wants to ship himself to
China because he wants to beat up his pen pal
for some reason. And Dewey, the very smart younger brother,
UM decides to help him and also screw with him
by packing him up into a giant wooden create and
then simulating what it would feel like to make that
journey by like, you know, rocking it back and forth
and having sound effects. And he even had like a
(06:18):
fish out so it smelled like the sea and all
this stuff, and Um he's got like, you know, boxes
of cereal and like milk and stuff inside the crate. Um.
I just love the idea of of anyone shipping themselves
somewhere as a substitute to other more traditional forms of travel,
and shout out of course the Henry Box Brown. I
know a lot of our fellow listeners are waiting to
(06:39):
at least have the mention of this brilliant man who
escaped slavery when he was thirty three by having himself
mailed in eighteen forty nine to Philadelphia, Which is talking
about out of the box thinking. Well, the out of
the box thinking led him into a box and then
he got out of it. Eventually did get out of
the box. That's true. Um, yeah, that's a really cool story.
(07:01):
And there's an episode of stuff you missed in history
class on that very subject. So let's let's bring ourselves
forward to the future. You mentioned UPS earlier. They started
out in Seattle in seven as the American Messenger Company
(07:23):
or AMC, with no affiliation to the to the Theater Company. Now,
this was kind of like a gig economy. There were
a bunch of kids who weren't full time employees. They
were just doing odd jobs for not a ton of money.
Remember the episode we did about the firefly catchers an hour,
It was that company. That was the company. It was
(07:44):
like a chemical company that like literally crowdsourced little kids
to go around catching fireflies. Um, this was like that
on a smaller scale initially, which is crazy considering you know,
the corporate Megalith's eventually became. But yeah, they describe it
here as as almost like a lemonade. It stand mentality. Uh.
And then of course it ballooned when this young man
(08:05):
at the age of nineteen, James casey Um expanded and
he started kind of combining the efforts of all of
these little disparate, um gig kind of courier services and
moved outside of Seattle and then changed the company's United
parcel service in nineteen nineteen. And their big thing was
using cars. Like we said, it was much more nimble. Um.
(08:28):
They were very good at planning these routes and making
things as efficient as possible. Yeah, and at this time
UPS experiences tremendous growth thinks, of course, to the boom
of the automobile industry. It also naturally becomes a direct
competitor to this parcel Post system because UPS gets something
(08:51):
called common carrier rights. Common carrier rights mean that shooping
companies like UPS have some of the rights and responsibilities
of a public company or state service even though it's
a private entity. Because it's explicitly working for the general
public good, it is subject to regulation by the government.
(09:14):
This sounds like a bunch of red tape, but ultimately
what it allows UPS to do is to become at
the time the biggest package shipper in the world. And
uh they are, of course still overland shipping. There's no
airmail yet, although some some folks tried, right, I think
the US government actually tried airmail a couple of times.
(09:35):
The po D, the Post Office Department, started delivering mail
by aircraft in nineteen eighteen. But they couldn't, you know,
they couldn't deliver packages, just letters, just very fancy letters,
and that list included. We had the newly established United
States Postal Service, which, as we mentioned at the top
of the show, went from being a more of a
(09:56):
department to an actual agency. They have the letter deliveries,
thatch suation on lock. No one else really needs to
mess with that. It's not really an area of concern
for any of these other companies, we have ups and
then in nineteen seventy one we have Federal Express, which
which the seed of that idea began in a Yale
dorm room in nineteen sixty five. It was a dream
(10:19):
the subject of a term paper by undergraduate Frederick W. Smith,
who essentially invented the idea of airmail Um. In this
paper that didn't even get a particularly good grade. Uh.
He his professor did not see the value in this
revolutionary idea, and he he didn't flunk it, but it
(10:41):
probably it sounds like he gave it more of a C.
So then in seventy one, after a little bit of
time spent in the military, Smith got out of his
service and he bought um a very large share controlling
share in an Arkansas company called Arkansas Aviation Sales, which
is in Little Rock, Um. And he began to see
(11:02):
how tough the logistical side of using airplanes to deliver
freight in a timely manner. So he decided that he
was going to find a better way to do that,
using kind of the lessons he learned from that term paper. Right,
so fred Smith is pretty candid with himself and the
(11:23):
employees of Arkansas Aviation sales about the difficulties facing their company,
and I gotta say I appreciate that FedEx's official website
is also very honest about the bumps and obstacles in
the way. That's where we're getting a lot of this
history here. Uh. He is behaving exactly like all those
(11:43):
people you see at the beginning of made for TV
infomercials where something happens, they kind of bumble something and
they go, there's got to be a better way. And
that is where he gets the idea for Federal Express
because going back to the paper, which was still very prescient,
he thinks there are two big challenges logistics and then infrastructure,
(12:06):
right which are inextricably intertwined. So he also he chooses
the name Federal Express for some pretty clever reasons. Said,
federal makes it sound, you know, more like a government entity,
like like patriotic too. You wanted to appeal to people's
patriotism and the idea that I think the Federalist papers
(12:27):
was a big part of the foundation of our country
and there would be positive associations with that. Yeah, he
thinks it will help attract public attention. It also helps
him with one of his first potential clients, the Federal
Reserve Bank. He thought, they're gonna love this. They turned
it down, but obviously FedEx soldiered on. They moved to Memphis,
Tennessee because it was kind of central in the US
(12:51):
and the airport was in a great location, was rarely
closed due to bad weather. They were also able They said, look, hey, guys,
if you want to move FedEx here, we will work
with you. Yeah. And again that goes into his forward
thinking as far as like streamlining the process and the logistics.
So UM. They began operations on April seventeenth and nineteen
(13:11):
seventy three. According to their official website, they had three
hundred and eighty nine employees UM and fourteen planes that
were housed in hangars there at the Memphis Airport, and
on their first outing they delivered a hundred and eighties
six packages to twenty five states UM Rochester, New York,
to Miami, Florida and all points in between. And much
(13:34):
like the Pony Express, they were not profitable UM at first,
but unlike the Pony Express, they did figure out how
to soldier through and from nineteen seventy three to nineteen
seventy five, no profits. But then in July of nineteen
seventy five it started becoming a very um prominent carrier
(13:55):
of luxury goods in the marketplace UM, and it started
to become this kind of bellweather of how to do
business shipping things in this kind of new era of
on demand, door to door shipment. This path ultimately leads
(14:16):
FedEx to become the world's largest all cargo air fleet.
They have tons of planes thanks to deregulation, and in
three they were the first American company to get one
billion dollars worth of revenue within ten years of a startup,
without being bought by anybody and without merging. So they
(14:38):
got there on their own in that business sense. And
this still despite the company's size, it's just a small
piece of the weird, weird, gigantic thing we call the
shipping industry. We didn't even get into cargo ships when
everybody listening to know, if you want a weird vacation,
(14:58):
you can actually book a ride on a cargo ship.
You know why. You just have to be very flexible
with your times. Is it like cost effective? This is
more like a weird vacation. It's like it's a weird vacation.
It's it's a slow boat across the ocean. So I
wouldn't like book myself passage on a cargo ship to
save money. Uh maybe you could, depending, you know. It's
(15:21):
it's just it's so different because it's gonna take such
a long time. You might have to you can say, okay,
I want to arrive you know, X amount of months
or days later in East Asia, but they'll say, okay,
well give it a margin vera of a month or two.
Oh yeah, that makes it. That makes a lot more sense.
And we mentioned this briefly at the top of the show.
(15:43):
But like where things are now, it's interesting how it's
come full circle now. Shipping and receiving is becoming much
more back to those old days of just kind of
getting a courier like with like a task Rabbit person
or using uber in some places, like in New York,
Uber driver will pick up and bring you stuff, you know,
like if they're not supposed to, but they will. And
(16:05):
then you have other delivery you know, on demand services
like ziftyh and what have you. And I feel like
we've kind of come back full circle. Um, not to mention, uh,
the elephant in the room the giant, giant elephant in
the room, which is Amazon in terms of how potentially
they stand to dominate shipping and receiving through their Amazon
(16:27):
Prime memberships, etcetera. You know, Like I mean, they have
all these fulfillment centers that are nearby, so when you
order goods, you're not having to have it shipped from
across the country. You're literally have a duplicate facility that's
much more close to you that you could get your
whatever it is, your you know, Pikachu key chain, you know,
in the same day, because it's literally just a local
(16:48):
delivery person bringing it from that fulfillment center that might
only be an hour or even less away from you
if you live in a bigger city like New York.
So it's interesting to see how that's going to develop
as they start, you know, experimenting with terrifying things like
using drones to deliver birthday cakes and and what what whatnot.
And now we've we've caught up to the current situation.
(17:10):
We also want to give an honorable mentioned to several
strange things that have been shipped in the past. Of course,
diseases have been shipped accidentally. I would assume, well, there's
a lady named Miss Daisy James in a August seven
issue of the New York Times, who said the dead
birds and small animals are sent to taxidermists throughout the country.
(17:33):
She also handled different strains of smallpox, diphtheria, and scarlet
fever that were shipped by doctors to the health board.
Remember when people were sending anthrax in the mail a
lot that was a thing or fake anthrax as well?
There were also been entire buildings shipped, sometimes brick by
brick pets of course, loose diamonds, which are you know
(17:56):
the millionaires go to escape plan uh, and many many
other strange things. One one thing that might be of
interest to some of us is that you can ship
things anonymously through the mail. These are These can range
from practical jokes to uh to just very weird stuff
(18:17):
or contraband perhaps or contraband perhaps, which we are not
we're not condoning right on a family show. But what
happens to the recipient? I mean, sure, you can send
something um anonymously, but the person that receives it could
then be on the hook for whatever you sent. Is
how does that work? Well, there's a need article on
(18:37):
cheat sheet dot com, where it says it lists some
different entities that will help you send weird stuff. You
can send somebody a potato in the mail. You can
send them a glitter bomb, which is crazy, really really horrible. Yeah.
I would not do that to someone, and please don't
do that. It just gets in every orifice. It's been
described as, of course, the herpes of the craft world.
(19:00):
It's that's very true. You can ship a brick, you
can send people fake money. You can send them a
gigantic teddy bear, a venus flytrap, just some sand. One
of the weirdest things. A lot of these are jokes
and strange pranks. You can send prank candles that smell
good when they burn for the first few minutes and
(19:20):
then they go from like vanilla to you know, sulfur
uh uh fecal smell. Yeah, and then you can send
the worst cup of coffee. You can send an eggplant, uh,
some things like that, Like I think potatoes and coconuts
you don't even have to wrap. You can just put
a stamp on them. I do love a good mail
order coconut. That's that's the way I uh, that's the
(19:43):
way I often prefer them. Uh and this this brings
us to you, dear listeners, What are some of the
weirdest things that you have ever encountered via parcel or post?
What's the weirdest thing you've ever delivered or had delivered
to you? We want to know. You can find us
on Facebook, can find us on Instagram. You can find
us on Twitter, not just as ridiculous history, but as
(20:05):
individuals as well. You can find me exclusively on Instagram,
where I go by the handle at how Now Noel Brown.
You can find me on Twitter at ben Bowland h
s W for the old school how stuff Works fans
out there. You can also find me on Instagram in
various adventures where I am at ben Boland. Thanks as
(20:26):
always the super producer Casey Pegram, Alex Williams who composed
our theme, research associate gabelues here. Um Christopher Haciota is
here in spirit Eve's Jeff Cote of course, the Quister
a K. Jonathan Strickland, a k A Young Quizzles, a
k A A sap Quizzy a k A the Worst.
Oh and hey, um, do us a slide? And why
(20:48):
don't you go over to iTunes or your podcast platform
of choice and leave us a nice review or a
really hilarious bad review. We might read it on the
show one day. And if you don't want to do
an NS that, you can send us an email where
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checks in the mail folks. Thanks for tuning in. We'll
see you soon. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
(21:16):
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Don't call it a comeback,
we'll actually do, because we are back with part two
on the weird, weird, weird history of shipping things in
the US. If you have not listened to part one
for for you know, for your sake, we're just looking
out for you, go ahead and pause this, Go play
part one. It's worth it. We'll wait. I'm Noah by
(00:48):
the way, Oh that's right, and I am Ben Boland.
We are joined as always with our super producer, Casey Pegroom,
and we are officially halfway through the very strange story
of how things it from point A to point B
and all the weird stops they make along the way.
How about we joined that already in progress. The way
that Atlas Obscura phrases is pretty funny. The author says,
(01:11):
the owners of the Central Pacific Railroad created a company
solely for the purpose of screwing with Wells Fargo, which
which I always love it when people interject a little
bit of petty humanity into these stories. This story is
full of petty humanity for sure. Now, yeah, yeah, we've
all been to the we've all had this ship something somewhere,
(01:31):
so you're right, they do. They do decide to purchase
this company, and they continue being this huge force in
the package industry until World War One. Because during World
War One, the US government forces all of these postage services,
all the express industry companies to combine into a single
(01:55):
monolithic thing and they nationalize it and they call this
the Railway Express Agency. Yeah, and this is specifically so
the government could have an easier time of shipping wartime
necessities um such as rations, human beings and all of
the other trappings and accoutrement of of war. And as
(02:15):
we know in history, you know, all good things must
come to an end um and disruptive technology is just
the order of the day. And in nineteen seventy five,
this monolith um collapsed as well, and it's because of
motor vehicles. They they just became much more efficient for
shipping things because you weren't bound to literal routes laid
(02:36):
out on tracks, and you could just be a lot
more nimble in shipping stuff. And that's when we start
to see Wells far ago completely abandoning uh shipping and
receiving in favor of exclusively their banking operations, which again
they were happening in tandem. The banks were kind of
part and parcel, if you'll excuse the pun. You don't
have to um to the shipping business. Because of the time,
(03:00):
they were already handling these assets that made sense to
them to be able to just invest them and hold
them for people in all of these various wells fargo locations.
So they give that up and this is when we
start to see um a lot more individual companies pop
up startup companies at the time, for lack of a
better term, like ups and FedEx. Yeah, we have to
(03:20):
remember that while all these swells and shipping tycoons were
putting their stamp on history. Uh, we have to remember
that the Federal Post Office at this time was a
lot more like a regulatory agency than something that actually
shipped packages and letters. So while all this is happening,
(03:43):
and let's let's jump back in time here in the
early days of the Federal Post Office, it wasn't a
shipping company. It was more of a regulatory agency. They
made rules about how packages and letters should be sent.
Until that is, several big changes occur, which us to
the current day. The first was the Rural Free Delivery Act.
(04:05):
There the establishment of Rural Free Delivery in eight This
was huge from more than half of the country because
half of the country lived in rural areas and now
they could get mail directly sent to them instead of
having to go to you know, the county seat to
find the post office. And in nineteen thirteen there was
(04:26):
another big change. It was something called parcel post. Yeah,
parcel post, it's to send. I mean, it's as simple
as it became much more cost effective to ship things,
maxing out at fifty pounds at the time. In fact,
it was so efficient that, as is referenced in this
Atlas Obscure article, uh, college students would ship their dirty
(04:49):
laundry home and the especially made metal boxes so their
parents could do their laundry for them and then ship
it back. And it was more cost effective to do
that than to go to a laundry matter hire somebody
to to wash their clothes for them, which is crazy, right.
You have to wonder was the mail just that cheap
(05:09):
or were laundry mats themselves incredibly expensive. There's so much
weird stuff that's been mailed over over the years. We
can we can laundry list a few towards the end,
but we should mention just an honorable mention, of course,
to Charlotte May Piersdorff, who was literally mailed from Grangeville
to Lewiston, Idaho for about fifty three cents. Her trip
(05:34):
only took a few hours. This was legal at the
time because she was under the weight limit. I hope
they poked some holes in the box for her. She
did make it, she did survive, yes, so maybe she
was practicing some sort of deep meditation to restrict your breathing.
I have you ever seen that Malcolm in the middle
episode where the older brother whose name I'm forgetting, what's
(05:55):
his name, doesn't matter, he wants to ship himself to
China because he wants to beat up his pen pal
for some reason. And Dewey, the very smart younger brother,
UM decides to help him and also screw with him
by packing him up into a giant wooden create and
then simulating what it would feel like to make that
journey by like, you know, rocking it back and forth
and having sound effects. And he even had like a
(06:18):
fish out so it smelled like the sea and all
this stuff, and Um he's got like, you know, boxes
of cereal and like milk and stuff inside the crate. Um.
I just love the idea of of anyone shipping themselves
somewhere as a substitute to other more traditional forms of travel,
and shout out of course the Henry Box Brown. I
know a lot of our fellow listeners are waiting to
(06:39):
at least have the mention of this brilliant man who
escaped slavery when he was thirty three by having himself
mailed in eighteen forty nine to Philadelphia, Which is talking
about out of the box thinking. Well, the out of
the box thinking led him into a box and then
he got out of it. Eventually did get out of
the box. That's true. Um, yeah, that's a really cool story.
(07:01):
And there's an episode of stuff you missed in history
class on that very subject. So let's let's bring ourselves
forward to the future. You mentioned UPS earlier. They started
out in Seattle in seven as the American Messenger Company
(07:23):
or AMC, with no affiliation to the to the Theater Company. Now,
this was kind of like a gig economy. There were
a bunch of kids who weren't full time employees. They
were just doing odd jobs for not a ton of money.
Remember the episode we did about the firefly catchers an hour,
It was that company. That was the company. It was
(07:44):
like a chemical company that like literally crowdsourced little kids
to go around catching fireflies. Um, this was like that
on a smaller scale initially, which is crazy considering you know,
the corporate Megalith's eventually became. But yeah, they describe it
here as as almost like a lemonade. It stand mentality. Uh.
And then of course it ballooned when this young man
(08:05):
at the age of nineteen, James casey Um expanded and
he started kind of combining the efforts of all of
these little disparate, um gig kind of courier services and
moved outside of Seattle and then changed the company's United
parcel service in nineteen nineteen. And their big thing was
using cars. Like we said, it was much more nimble. Um.
(08:28):
They were very good at planning these routes and making
things as efficient as possible. Yeah, and at this time
UPS experiences tremendous growth thinks, of course, to the boom
of the automobile industry. It also naturally becomes a direct
competitor to this parcel Post system because UPS gets something
(08:51):
called common carrier rights. Common carrier rights mean that shooping
companies like UPS have some of the rights and responsibilities
of a public company or state service even though it's
a private entity. Because it's explicitly working for the general
public good, it is subject to regulation by the government.
(09:14):
This sounds like a bunch of red tape, but ultimately
what it allows UPS to do is to become at
the time the biggest package shipper in the world. And
uh they are, of course still overland shipping. There's no
airmail yet, although some some folks tried, right, I think
the US government actually tried airmail a couple of times.
(09:35):
The po D, the Post Office Department, started delivering mail
by aircraft in nineteen eighteen. But they couldn't, you know,
they couldn't deliver packages, just letters, just very fancy letters,
and that list included. We had the newly established United
States Postal Service, which, as we mentioned at the top
of the show, went from being a more of a
(09:56):
department to an actual agency. They have the letter deliveries,
thatch suation on lock. No one else really needs to
mess with that. It's not really an area of concern
for any of these other companies, we have ups and
then in nineteen seventy one we have Federal Express, which
which the seed of that idea began in a Yale
dorm room in nineteen sixty five. It was a dream
(10:19):
the subject of a term paper by undergraduate Frederick W. Smith,
who essentially invented the idea of airmail Um. In this
paper that didn't even get a particularly good grade. Uh.
He his professor did not see the value in this
revolutionary idea, and he he didn't flunk it, but it
(10:41):
probably it sounds like he gave it more of a C.
So then in seventy one, after a little bit of
time spent in the military, Smith got out of his
service and he bought um a very large share controlling
share in an Arkansas company called Arkansas Aviation Sales, which
is in Little Rock, Um. And he began to see
(11:02):
how tough the logistical side of using airplanes to deliver
freight in a timely manner. So he decided that he
was going to find a better way to do that,
using kind of the lessons he learned from that term paper. Right,
so fred Smith is pretty candid with himself and the
(11:23):
employees of Arkansas Aviation sales about the difficulties facing their company,
and I gotta say I appreciate that FedEx's official website
is also very honest about the bumps and obstacles in
the way. That's where we're getting a lot of this
history here. Uh. He is behaving exactly like all those
(11:43):
people you see at the beginning of made for TV
infomercials where something happens, they kind of bumble something and
they go, there's got to be a better way. And
that is where he gets the idea for Federal Express
because going back to the paper, which was still very prescient,
he thinks there are two big challenges logistics and then infrastructure,
(12:06):
right which are inextricably intertwined. So he also he chooses
the name Federal Express for some pretty clever reasons. Said,
federal makes it sound, you know, more like a government entity,
like like patriotic too. You wanted to appeal to people's
patriotism and the idea that I think the Federalist papers
(12:27):
was a big part of the foundation of our country
and there would be positive associations with that. Yeah, he
thinks it will help attract public attention. It also helps
him with one of his first potential clients, the Federal
Reserve Bank. He thought, they're gonna love this. They turned
it down, but obviously FedEx soldiered on. They moved to Memphis,
Tennessee because it was kind of central in the US
(12:51):
and the airport was in a great location, was rarely
closed due to bad weather. They were also able They said, look, hey, guys,
if you want to move FedEx here, we will work
with you. Yeah. And again that goes into his forward
thinking as far as like streamlining the process and the logistics.
So UM. They began operations on April seventeenth and nineteen
(13:11):
seventy three. According to their official website, they had three
hundred and eighty nine employees UM and fourteen planes that
were housed in hangars there at the Memphis Airport, and
on their first outing they delivered a hundred and eighties
six packages to twenty five states UM Rochester, New York,
to Miami, Florida and all points in between. And much
(13:34):
like the Pony Express, they were not profitable UM at first,
but unlike the Pony Express, they did figure out how
to soldier through and from nineteen seventy three to nineteen
seventy five, no profits. But then in July of nineteen
seventy five it started becoming a very um prominent carrier
(13:55):
of luxury goods in the marketplace UM, and it started
to become this kind of bellweather of how to do
business shipping things in this kind of new era of
on demand, door to door shipment. This path ultimately leads
(14:16):
FedEx to become the world's largest all cargo air fleet.
They have tons of planes thanks to deregulation, and in
three they were the first American company to get one
billion dollars worth of revenue within ten years of a startup,
without being bought by anybody and without merging. So they
(14:38):
got there on their own in that business sense. And
this still despite the company's size, it's just a small
piece of the weird, weird, gigantic thing we call the
shipping industry. We didn't even get into cargo ships when
everybody listening to know, if you want a weird vacation,
(14:58):
you can actually book a ride on a cargo ship.
You know why. You just have to be very flexible
with your times. Is it like cost effective? This is
more like a weird vacation. It's like it's a weird vacation.
It's it's a slow boat across the ocean. So I
wouldn't like book myself passage on a cargo ship to
save money. Uh maybe you could, depending, you know. It's
(15:21):
it's just it's so different because it's gonna take such
a long time. You might have to you can say, okay,
I want to arrive you know, X amount of months
or days later in East Asia, but they'll say, okay,
well give it a margin vera of a month or two.
Oh yeah, that makes it. That makes a lot more sense.
And we mentioned this briefly at the top of the show.
(15:43):
But like where things are now, it's interesting how it's
come full circle now. Shipping and receiving is becoming much
more back to those old days of just kind of
getting a courier like with like a task Rabbit person
or using uber in some places, like in New York,
Uber driver will pick up and bring you stuff, you know,
like if they're not supposed to, but they will. And
(16:05):
then you have other delivery you know, on demand services
like ziftyh and what have you. And I feel like
we've kind of come back full circle. Um, not to mention, uh,
the elephant in the room the giant, giant elephant in
the room, which is Amazon in terms of how potentially
they stand to dominate shipping and receiving through their Amazon
(16:27):
Prime memberships, etcetera. You know, Like I mean, they have
all these fulfillment centers that are nearby, so when you
order goods, you're not having to have it shipped from
across the country. You're literally have a duplicate facility that's
much more close to you that you could get your
whatever it is, your you know, Pikachu key chain, you know,
in the same day, because it's literally just a local
(16:48):
delivery person bringing it from that fulfillment center that might
only be an hour or even less away from you
if you live in a bigger city like New York.
So it's interesting to see how that's going to develop
as they start, you know, experimenting with terrifying things like
using drones to deliver birthday cakes and and what what whatnot.
And now we've we've caught up to the current situation.
(17:10):
We also want to give an honorable mentioned to several
strange things that have been shipped in the past. Of course,
diseases have been shipped accidentally. I would assume, well, there's
a lady named Miss Daisy James in a August seven
issue of the New York Times, who said the dead
birds and small animals are sent to taxidermists throughout the country.
(17:33):
She also handled different strains of smallpox, diphtheria, and scarlet
fever that were shipped by doctors to the health board.
Remember when people were sending anthrax in the mail a
lot that was a thing or fake anthrax as well?
There were also been entire buildings shipped, sometimes brick by
brick pets of course, loose diamonds, which are you know
(17:56):
the millionaires go to escape plan uh, and many many
other strange things. One one thing that might be of
interest to some of us is that you can ship
things anonymously through the mail. These are These can range
from practical jokes to uh to just very weird stuff
(18:17):
or contraband perhaps or contraband perhaps, which we are not
we're not condoning right on a family show. But what
happens to the recipient? I mean, sure, you can send
something um anonymously, but the person that receives it could
then be on the hook for whatever you sent. Is
how does that work? Well, there's a need article on
(18:37):
cheat sheet dot com, where it says it lists some
different entities that will help you send weird stuff. You
can send somebody a potato in the mail. You can
send them a glitter bomb, which is crazy, really really horrible. Yeah.
I would not do that to someone, and please don't
do that. It just gets in every orifice. It's been
described as, of course, the herpes of the craft world.
(19:00):
It's that's very true. You can ship a brick, you
can send people fake money. You can send them a
gigantic teddy bear, a venus flytrap, just some sand. One
of the weirdest things. A lot of these are jokes
and strange pranks. You can send prank candles that smell
good when they burn for the first few minutes and
(19:20):
then they go from like vanilla to you know, sulfur
uh uh fecal smell. Yeah, and then you can send
the worst cup of coffee. You can send an eggplant, uh,
some things like that, Like I think potatoes and coconuts
you don't even have to wrap. You can just put
a stamp on them. I do love a good mail
order coconut. That's that's the way I uh, that's the
(19:43):
way I often prefer them. Uh and this this brings
us to you, dear listeners, What are some of the
weirdest things that you have ever encountered via parcel or post?
What's the weirdest thing you've ever delivered or had delivered
to you? We want to know. You can find us
on Facebook, can find us on Instagram. You can find
us on Twitter, not just as ridiculous history, but as
(20:05):
individuals as well. You can find me exclusively on Instagram,
where I go by the handle at how Now Noel Brown.
You can find me on Twitter at ben Bowland h
s W for the old school how stuff Works fans
out there. You can also find me on Instagram in
various adventures where I am at ben Boland. Thanks as
(20:26):
always the super producer Casey Pegram, Alex Williams who composed
our theme, research associate gabelues here. Um Christopher Haciota is
here in spirit Eve's Jeff Cote of course, the Quister
a K. Jonathan Strickland, a k A Young Quizzles, a
k A A sap Quizzy a k A the Worst.
Oh and hey, um, do us a slide? And why
(20:48):
don't you go over to iTunes or your podcast platform
of choice and leave us a nice review or a
really hilarious bad review. We might read it on the
show one day. And if you don't want to do
an NS that, you can send us an email where
we are ridiculous at i heart radio dot com The
checks in the mail folks. Thanks for tuning in. We'll
see you soon. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
(21:16):
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
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Noel Brown
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