Bad Idea #1: Shipping children in the mail

What weighs under 48 pounds, doesn’t need a seat, and costs just 53 cents to send across the state?

Your niece. In 1914.

When the U.S. Postal Service introduced parcel post in 1913, it was meant for packages that weighed 50 lbs or less. But “package” wasn’t strictly defined. And so for a short window in US history, American families started mailing children like they were sacks of flour with good manners.

This wasn’t a joke. This was logistics arbitrage.

Meet Charlotte May Pierstorff.

In February 1914, she was mailed from Grangeville to Lewiston, Idaho (73 miles). Her parents paid 53 cents in stamps and pinned them to her coat. A mail clerk escorted her, safely, for the full trip.

And it wasn’t just Charlotte. Dozens of children were “shipped” via mail routes. Some traveled for miles. Others just a few towns over. They weren’t stuffed in boxes. They were entrusted to the U.S. government’s most reliable system: the mail carrier.

Why?

Because it was cheap. Because it was safe. Because technically, it wasn’t against the rules. This wasn’t lazy parenting. It was creative adaptation.

For families that couldn’t afford passenger train tickets for their kids, parcel post was a brand new, fast system with not-so-well-defined rules.

Kids were packages for a few oddball years, and the mailman became a babysitter.

The weird thing in all this…

Nobody got hurt.
Nobody went missing.
And the system worked — until the USPS shut it down.

The wildest part of the story isn’t that children got mailed. It’s that it made perfect sense, for a moment.

When systems are new, the loopholes abound. Use them.

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Art/Social/Ad

New ideas are born from brushing up against life, a process I call happy collisions. Here are a few pieces of inspiration to keep the ideas flowing: one piece of ART, one SOCIAL post, and one AD (or a bit of clever marketing).

ART

Defiant Jazz by Rudy Willingham — Record designed and animated to celebrate the season 2 finale of Severence, featuring the “Defiant Jazz” dance scene from earlier in the season. Brilliant.

SOCIAL

The gravity/no gravity icons are genius. They also turn out to be specific to the Alien cinematic universe, designed in 1978 by Rob Cobb for the original Alien movie as a semiotic standard “for all commercial trans-stellar and heavy element transport craft.” Original Bluesky post here.

AD

From RGA on Threads: “We originally made this for our people to celebrate our new era of independence. And to show how our future as an innovation company is intimately connected to our past. But we thought others might enjoy it as well.

And now a word from our founder...”