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brilliant.org/HAI. When you’re young, your parents lie to you
a lot—they tell you Santa Claus is real, they tell you Brussel sprouts are delicious,
they you that you’re handsome and that they don’t like your sister more than you, and
of course they tell you the classic fib that babies are delivered by storks. Now of course, none of those things are true:
Santa Claus was invented by Jeff Bezos, Brussel sprouts are made of gross-juice, you’re
average-looking at best, and your sister is way cooler than you. As for the one about the stork, though, it’s
not exactly true, but it’s close enough that we can pretend it is for segue reasons. Although babies were never delivered by birds,
they were delivered, for a very brief period, by the United States Postal Service, which,
personally, I much prefer to bird-delivery as I’ve rarely had a postal worker poop
on my head. So, you see, back before we had email or snapchat,
mail was the lifeblood of America, and the US Postal Service was the circulatory system
that distributed that blood. If you wanted to send your friends a letter
or a package or a drunken photo of yourself with puppy ears, you had to do it through
the USPS. In fact, the Postal Service was considered
so important that the Postmaster General made the second-highest salary of any public official
in the US, more than anyone except the President, and that’s actually still the case to this
day, which you have to imagine is a little embarrassing for the Vice President. The key moment, though, was in 1913, when
the Postal Service made a change that would revolutionize American commerce: a brand new
parcel service, that allowed people to send packages up to 11 pounds or 5 kilograms—far
above the previous four pound limit. This was important because it made mail-order
shopping possible, which lead to the popularity of catalogues like Sears Roebuck, which lead
to massive growth in American consumerism, which lead to Americans buying goods on credit,
which lead to an over-expansion of credit, which lead to a stock market crash, which
lead to the Great Depression—or, as I like to call it, the big mood—which lead to the
book The Grapes of Wrath, which lead to me getting assigned to read The Grapes of Wrath
in high school, which lead to me procrastinating my reading by starting a YouTube channel,
which lead to the video you’re watching right now, which led to thousands of hours
of lost human productivity, but I’m getting off topic: the parcel service meant that now,
through the mail, you could send and receive heavier items like toasters, shoes, baby dolls,
baby strollers, baby cribs, and, for a short time, babies. Turned out, when the parcel service was first
created, they had forgotten to make a specific rule against mailing children. Easy mistake, we’ve all done it, but it
meant that parents looking to save money on train tickets started mailing their children,
and in the spirit of the referee who let Air Bud play basketball, because there wasn’t
a specific rule against it, it was allowed—briefly, at least. The first known case of someone sending their
child in the mail was by Jesse and Matilda Beagle of Glen Este, Ohio, who paid 15 cents
in postage to send their newly born son—who was 10 pounds, just under the 11 pound limit—to
their grandmother’s house, which was about a mile away. Now on the one hand, you could argue it would
have been more responsible for them to just walk their baby there themselves, but on the
other hand, responsible parents don’t end up getting talked about on YouTube 107 years
later, so who’s the real winner here? While the Beagles may have been the first,
they weren’t the last. To be clear, mailing children was never a
common practice, but there are a few other recorded examples, including a Mrs EH Staley
of Stratford, Oklahoma who mailed her two-year-old grandson to his aunt in Wellington, Kansas
for 18 cents. The most famous story is of May Pierstorff,
a six-year-old girl whose parents sent her as freight mail on a train, where she traveled
71 miles from Grangeville to Lewiston, Idaho in 1914 to visit with her grandmother. Her story is now the subject of the children’s
book, Mailing May, which joins a long line of books that treat child endangerment like
an adventure. One interesting aspect of child-mailing is
that the the children weren’t hidden in boxes or crates or giant novelty birthday
cakes; they were just normal, package-free children who would have postage pinned to
their clothes, and they’d get handed to the mailman, who would transport them wherever
it was they needed to go. In a way, it was less like being mailed and
more like getting carried somewhere by a babysitter whose other babies were envelopes, but now
let’s get to the real question: Was mailing children actually legal, or was it just the
kind of illegal thing that people still did in the early 1900s, like brewing moonshine
or preventing minorities from voting? The answer is that it’s not totally clear. In 1913 the Postmaster general made a public
statement in response to reports of child-mailing that claimed there was already a rule on the
books that the only live things the parcel service would transport were bees and bugs,
which would, obviously exclude children, but nonetheless, on June 14, 1920, the Postmaster
General made a new rule specifically barring children from being sent in the mail, implying
that the legality of the practice was at least up in air enough to make a specific rule about
it. Now, on an unrelated note, the current postmaster
general—aka the second highest-paid public official in the US—is someone named Megan
Brennan, who went to MIT, which means that she probably loves learning new things about
math, science, and computer science. In other words, she would probably really
enjoy using Brilliant. Learning new complex things can often feel
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