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| eggshaped
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| 24688. Sat Sep 24, 2005 2:50 pm |
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Gerhard Zucker was a German engineer and businessman. Throughout the early 1930s he travelled Germany showing off his experiments in transporting mail by rocket.
His rockets were advertised as cruise-missile styled rockets, but in actual fact they were nothing more than a huge rocket body carried by eight fireworks.
The experiments were rarely,if ever, a sucess, but unrelenting, in 1934 he came to Britain in order to show his idea off to the royal mail.
| Quote: | On the early morning of June 6,1934 Zucker, Dombrowski, a reporter and a photographer from the London Daily Express, a philatelic magazine editor, and Hartman met on a hilltop on Sussex Downs. After a first successful test launch without payload, two launches were made with postal covers. The observers guessed the rockets went as high as 400 to 800 m. Banner headlines the next day announced 'The First British Rocket Mail' and carried Zucker's claim that soon he would inaugrate regular one minute rocket post service between Dover and Calais.
The next step was to to impress the Royal Mail with the potential of rocket post. Zucker announced a demonstration firing of his rocket over 1600 m of water between the town of Harris and the Isle of Scarp. .... Government officials watched on 31 July 1934 as the rocket exploded, blowing the burning packages all over the beach. |
Zucker was soon deported from Britain for postal fraud, only to find on his return to Germany that he was to be detained by the German government for co-operating with the british.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Zucker
http://www.postalheritage.org.uk/history/transport/air_rocket.html
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/zucocket.htm |
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| eggshaped
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| 24689. Sat Sep 24, 2005 2:57 pm |
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According to this site, which seems to be a museum in the West Indies, one could once be sentenced to death for opening a message-in-a-bottle.
| Quote: | | In 16th century England Queen Elizabeth I appointed an official “Uncorker of Ocean Bottles” making it a capital crime for anyone else to open the bottles. This severe punishment was seen as necessary as it assumed that some might contain secret messages from spies as well as from the British fleet who sent messages about enemy positions ashore in bottles. Whether this was an affective means to send information does not appear to have been recorded. |
http://www.tcmuseum.org/message_in_a_bottle/a_history_of_messages_in_bottles/
(could be a way to get rid of Sting once and for all) |
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| Flash
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| 24768. Sun Sep 25, 2005 12:51 am |
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James - ref the rocket mail, I collected this note a little while ago, but don't seem to have logged the source:
| Quote: | 1959 Submarine USS Barbero assists the United States Postal Service (USPS) in its search for more efficient forms of mail delivery with the first and only delivery of "Missile Mail." Shortly before noon Barbero fires a Regulus cruise missile from the Naval Auxiliary Air Station, Mayport, Florida. Twenty-two minutes later the missile strikes its target (its nuclear warhead had been replaced by two official USPS mail containers).
The mail consists entirely of commemorative postal covers addressed to President of the United States Dwight Eisenhower and other government officials.
United States Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield states: "This peacetime employment of a guided missile for the important and practical purpose of carrying mail, is the first known official use of missiles by any Post Office Department of any nation."
Summerfield proclaims the event to be "of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world," and predicts that "before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail." |
Interesting that it's apparently 25 years behind the British/German experiment. |
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| Gray
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| 24781. Sun Sep 25, 2005 10:37 am |
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Here's more about the Scarp rocket mail, as shown on the BBC series Coast recently. From the BBC site: | Quote: | Scarp - Rocket Post
The tiny island of Scarp now lies uninhabited just off the coast of the Isle of Harris in one of the most remote corners of Great Britain. But at the beginning of the 1900s Scarp had a thriving population who made a living crofting the land and fishing the local seas. In January 1934 Scarp hit the headlines when a young mother couldn't get a message to her doctor on the mainland and ended up giving birth to twin daughters on separate islands and two days apart.
When news of the twins' dramatic birth reached the ears of a German rocket inventor, Gerhard Zucker, he travelled to Scarp intent on solving the island's communication problems. His solution was air mail – delivered not by aircraft but by rocket. In July 1934 Zucker made two unsuccessful attempts at firing his rocket mail between Scarp and Harris. Neil Oliver and Mark Horton joins two modern rocketeers and take up where Zucker left off. |
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| Frederick The Monk
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| 24789. Sun Sep 25, 2005 1:30 pm |
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| Flash wrote: | | James - ref the rocket mail, I collected this note a little while ago, |
And here's the first day cover it carried:
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| eggshaped
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| 24869. Mon Sep 26, 2005 12:12 pm |
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Flash, your un-sourced post above seems to have been posted as well by Garrick.
post 7522
Maybe he will have a source if required. |
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| Flash
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| 24920. Mon Sep 26, 2005 5:19 pm |
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| Even if he doesn't, we've solved the mystery of where I nicked it from. Thank goodness I didn't try to pass it off as my own. |
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