It is difficult to think of a world without the parcel post, or a way for businesses to deliver printed shipping boxes filled with products that will safely and securely make their way to a customer’s door.

The development of advanced corrugated boxes and protective materials helped make it so reliable that everyone uses it, but before there could be a focus on better boxes, there needed to be a way to ensure they could travel across the country, and later across the world.

Many online businesses can only function because of parcel post, but it took many inventions and initiatives to make the country, and later the world, smaller, for it to happen.

The Age Of Rail

Historically, parcels had been delivered through a range of different postal services, but it was typically in an ad-hoc fashion. Prices varied, and there was no uniform type of transport nor type of packaging, so in many cases, a customer would organise the delivery of goods themselves.

The oldest ever complaint letter to the now-infamous Ea-Nasir revealed that as early as 1750 BC messengers would travel from customer to business and back again, carrying whatever they needed to, whether it was letter, money or low-quality copper ingots.

There was a seeming separation between any existing postal services and parcel delivery, and this only started to really change in the 19th century.

The original epicentre for this was various states that would later become Germany, as well as nearby Austria. Germany had started to integrate parcel delivery into the postal service as early as the 15th century in some states and Austria had done the same since the 17th century.

Other countries might have had local delivery services or the ability to use couriers, stagecoaches or other transport links to deliver parcels, but Germany appeared to be the first to integrate it into an existing letter postal service, something that Great Britain would not do until 1883 with the original Parcel Post.

The development of the railway network in various countries changed everything when it came to postal services. Parcels and letters could be carried across the country in significant numbers on a regular schedule and at prices that most people could afford.

Whilst the Penny Post was the first uniform postal service for letters, it would take until 1857 for uniform postal rates to appear in Germany and Austria, and much longer for this to appear with parcels.

One of the first people to take full advantage of parcel post was Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones, who created the first ever mail order business, using the railways and post office in Newtown, Wales to deliver woollen goods and other packages by using the railway’s courier services.

He was able to promise next-day delivery thanks to a very close relationship with the railway network, and the London and North Western Railway Company even provided him with parcel vans to allow him to deliver daily from Newtown to London.

However, it was not exactly a uniform service and required a very close relationship with existing transport infrastructure as well as building a bigger post office. Nobody else could do that, so for parcel post to thrive.

By 1874, a domestic parcel post provided the same uniformity for parcels in Germany as had been found with letters and the results were immediate.

The first year that it was established, over 38m parcels were carried using the service, a yearly figure which nearly doubled by 1881.

Its popularity did not go unnoticed, and as the potential for an international postal service became more than just a dream, a lot of the complexities found in various different countries needed to be unpacked and sifted through before a true uniform parcel post was possible.

The reason why the figures for Germany’s parcel post stop at 1881 is that by October that same year, the Universal Postal Union agreed on a uniform service for shipping parcels internationally, similar to the one that had already been agreed to for letters in 1874.

Several major countries, including Italy, Great Britain, India and Canada, claimed that they did not actually have a parcel service in their respective nations at the time, something that was only technically true.

Eventually, the Royal Mail started their Parcel Post service to standardise parcel delivery, even if the railways would continue to offer courier services under the name Red Star Parcels for decades afterwards.

Ultimately, it took a transport revolution that made nations and later the world smaller, a universal agreement between countries that had been and would eventually go to war with each other again, and the commitment of incredible couriers and the robustness of parcel packages.