The whole world celebrates August 2 every year Mailbox birthday.

The mailbox’s birthday in history

To celebrate this event, a date was set for the appearance of the first mailboxes on the streets of London. It happened on August 2, 1858. But this construction was known even more than three centuries before this date.

Sailor’s boot

In 1500, the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeo Dias, on his way to South Africa, got into a strong storm, in which he and most of the members of his expedition perished. The surviving officer decided to describe this event in order to inform about the reason for the disappearance of the expedition members in case the rest of the travelers did not return to their homeland. He stuffed the letter into a shoe, which he hung on a tree.

A year later, the navigator Juan da Nova found the message and built a chapel in that place. And local residents used that shoe for correspondence for a long time. Now there is a monument in the form of a big shoe in honor of one of the first postal structures.

In those days, European sailors, traveling to India, left messages at the Cape of Good Hope in a stone box, and ships returning to Europe took them.

Interesting facts about the mailbox

• In Florence at the beginning of the 16th century. wooden “halls” with a slit at the top were placed in churches, into which anonymous denunciations of the country’s enemies were dropped.
• In the 18th century canvas bags were hung for messages on English ships bound for America.
• And the first mailbox, similar to the current constructions, with the image of a letter and a postal horn, which is still an emblem of communication, was installed in Vienna in 1785.