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First Mailboxes

There is not one episode that can be consideredthe first mention of this invention. Three of them date back to the beginning of the 16th century. Then in Florence there were wooden "tambours", which had a slot above and served to collect letters. They were usually installed near the churches, and the inhabitants of the city often used them to throw anonymous letters against state traitors. At about the same time, English boxes were placed near the Cape of Good Hope boxes made of stone, serving as a buffer for the exchange of written information with other ships. Similar devices were available from seafarers from Holland. The Austrians also used mailboxes as early as the 16th century, although they were very modest in size and not stationary, but portable: postmen wore them, attaching them to a strap over their shoulder. The town of Legnica, located on the territory of modern Poland, also has claims to the first mention of the mailbox. There, according to the chronicles, it began to be used already in 1633. About boxes for the collection of letters is said and in the archival materials of the Parisian city mail, the moment of foundation of which is considered 1653 year.

In the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union

The very first mail boxes appeared in the middle19th century on the streets of the largest cities of the Russian Empire: Moscow and St. Petersburg. Soon they began to be installed in other regions. The first boxes were made of wood, but very quickly they were replaced by metal ones with the image of a postal envelope. And in 1901, boxes of orange began to appear. The postal service worked very quickly: letters and postcards, thrown in boxes, were sent to the destination on the same day by rail. In those years, the boxes that hung in the mail receiving points had two compartments. One was locked with a key and was intended for incoming correspondence. The second one was opened and used to store letters that were returned with a long absence of the addressee or the impossibility of finding it. In the 1920s in Moscow, boxes for receiving letters were posted directly on tramcar trailers. When the tram stopped near the post office, postal workers took out letters for further shipment. Now in Kaliningrad there is an unusual mailbox museum, numbering about 70 exhibits collected around the world. For the entrance to it you do not need to pay, because the exposition is located directly on the street, on the wall of one of the buildings in the historical part of the city.