There are a lot of functions that custom cardboard boxes need to provide, including standing out on a retail shelf and ensuring an ideal unboxing experience whilst also providing the robustness and functionality to ensure its contents survive round-the-world trips unharmed.

Whether parcels travel by sea, road, rail, air, or some combination of all of the above, boxes need to provide stability, protection, and cushioning for items contained within. The more carefully designed a product box is, the safer the contents will be.

This was particularly important in the years before the jet airliner made it possible to transport huge amounts of cargo by air, thanks to pioneering machines such as the de Havilland Comet entering service in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Before this, airmail deliveries of parcels and packages tended to be either huge or very small, but both of them had rather remarkable periods of success.

The Mail Plane

One of the problems found in the early era of aviation before the Second World War was that heavier-than-air aeroplanes were neither powerful enough nor aerodynamically designed enough to carry large enough payloads.

Whilst attempts at airmail had been made earlier, the first successful and widely used mail plane was the Airco DH4, a converted light bomber used during the First World War.

The two-seater plane was converted into a single-seat biplane with a watertight compartment to store post and parcels, in no small part because it was widely available as a military surplus craft following Armistice Day.

This plane would help launch the United States Post Office and would inspire the development of its successor, the Boeing Model 40, which would be the most common and most popular of the mail planes until the Second World War.

The problem with early aeroplanes is that they had a relatively small capacity for carrying post, which meant that the system in effect acted more like the Pony Express than the modern international airmail we know today.

The Second World War would ultimately change a lot of this as it would lead to huge developments in engine technology and aerodynamics. By the late 1940s, international jetliners could be reliably used rather than flying boats or the Short Mayo Composite.

This would ultimately end the need for dedicated small mail planes on a larger scale, although some very small-scale services existed for a few years afterwards. 

Airship Mail

At the same time as the development of the mail plane, the most common way to transport a high volume of post and parcels through the air was using grand zeppelin-class airships.

As they were lighter than air, they were capable of carrying much more post at higher altitudes and for much longer than a mail plane of the time, which meant that during the early 20th century and particularly following the Treaty of Versailles, airship mail became a hugely important part of mail logistics.

Multiple countries either used airships given to them via reparations or developed their own airship programmes, often by reverse-engineering those used during the war.

It was, at one point, seen as so important that the Empire State Building was built with a mask for dirigibles to moor, one that would ultimately never be used.

As early as the late 1920s, there were concerns about the vulnerabilities of scholarships during inclement weather and strong winds. The British R101, the USS Akron and most notably the Hindenburg led to a change in the perception of airships.

The footage of the latter, in particular, played a significant part in the downfall of airship mail, although had war not been declared two years later, there is a chance that the airship could have seen use for slightly longer than it was.

Instead, by the time of Victory in Europe Day, the airship was no longer seen as a viable form of post transportation, soon to be replaced by more reliable jetliners that could carry much higher capacities of post as well as passengers.

How Did The Evolution Of Airmail Affect Boxes?

Airmail was, in its early forms, quite a volatile form of parcel transportation, and businesses which relied on it to deliver packages to customers needed to take into account the effects of figurative and literal turbulence.

This, in combination with other developments in the modern supply chain such as containerisation, relatively standard pallets and the forklift truck led to the development of boxes designed to be easy to deliver but carefully protect their internal contents from possible damage.

Whilst modern airmail is far more predictable than any of its predecessors, these lessons have helped create sustainable, secure transportation boxes.