The Forgotten 1930s Dream of Rocket Mail

There was a time when checking the mail did not require protective eyewear. The mail carrier came down the road, the postman walked up the steps, and letters arrived in bags, by train between cities, or by airplane across great distances. Everybody generally agreed that correspondence should reach its destination without first passing through a cloud of smoke and fire.

Then came the 1930s. Across several countries, inventors and rocket enthusiasts began seriously considering a wonderfully simple question: if rockets could travel rapidly over obstacles that slowed conventional transportation, why couldn't they carry the mail? Not electronic messages. Not radio signals. Actual envelopes. With stamps. Inside rockets.

The idea sounds like something invented after a particularly energetic meeting between the post office and a fireworks manufacturer, but rocket mail was real. Experimenters launched thousands of pieces of correspondence during the interwar years, sometimes with surprising success and sometimes with results that could generously be described as distributing the mail over a much wider area than originally intended.

One of the earliest serious pioneers was Austrian engineer Friedrich Schmiedl. Schmiedl had experimented with rockets since his youth and eventually became interested in using them to cross the mountainous terrain surrounding Graz. On February 2, 1931, he launched a rocket carrying 102 letters from the Schöckl mountain toward the village of St. Radegund. The rocket was remotely controlled and descended by parachute. It worked. That alone was remarkable enough to encourage further experiments.

On September 9, another of Schmiedl's rockets carried 333 pieces of mail. The letters had been properly prepared and became prized souvenirs of a technology that, for a moment, seemed capable of becoming something much larger. Schmiedl envisioned rockets carrying correspondence between communities where mountains and difficult terrain made ordinary transportation slow. The Austrian postal authorities were considerably less convinced that the future involved firing everyone's electricity bill over a mountain. Nevertheless, the idea was loose.

And it was about to find one of its most determined champions thousands of miles away. His name was Stephen Hector Taylor-Smith, usually known simply as Stephen Smith, and if there is a patron saint of refusing to take an exploding mailbox as a hint, he deserves consideration.

Smith was working in India when he became fascinated with rocket transportation. On September 30, 1934, he conducted what is regarded as India's first rocket-mail experiment, firing a mail-carrying rocket from a ship toward Saugor Island. The rocket contained more than a hundred covers. It launched. It flew. And then it exploded. Mail scattered toward the sea.

For most people, watching their experimental postal system detonate midair would have been a natural point to reconsider the business plan. Smith apparently regarded it as data. Approximately 140 covers were recovered, taken to the lighthouse at Saugor Island, and postmarked. Those surviving envelopes became souvenirs of a delivery method that had technically transported the mail, although perhaps with more swimming involved than the postal customer would normally expect.

Four days later, Smith tried again. On October 4, a rocket containing 75 letters was fired from a fishing boat roughly 75 yards offshore at Diamond Harbour. This one actually reached the beach. Then it burst before landing. Seventy-five letters scattered across the sand. Once again, there is an important distinction here: the mail had reached its destination. It simply arrived everywhere at once.

Smith continued experimenting. There were ship-to-shore launches, shore-to-ship launches and nighttime launches. He carried miniature newspapers. Rockets were fired from locations around Bengal and eventually in Sikkim, where some experiments received official support. Slowly, despite the spectacular failures, Smith demonstrated that the basic concept could work.

Then reporters became interested. That was when everything went beautifully wrong. On February 27, 1935, journalists gathered near Calcutta for a special demonstration arranged in response to reports of Smith's successful experiments. Three rockets were prepared. The first was a smaller rocket carrying 130 letters. It launched successfully, passed over tall trees, and then exploded in midair. The letters fluttered down and scattered across the ground in front of the assembled press.

Presumably believing that the first demonstration had not made the point emphatically enough, Smith had two larger rockets waiting. Each was approximately 18 feet long. Both failed almost immediately after ignition. The contemporary account summarized the demonstration as a complete failure. One can only imagine the newspaper reporters quietly closing their notebooks after watching 130 pieces of correspondence rain out of the sky.

Yet something important was happening underneath the comedy. Smith kept experimenting because rocket delivery offered a genuine possibility that conventional transportation could not easily provide: crossing an obstacle without needing a road, bridge, or landing strip.

In June 1935, that possibility became particularly interesting. Smith fired rockets across the Roopnarain River in experiments connected with fundraising following the devastating Quetta earthquake. One carried packets containing rice, salt, grains, spices, and other small items along with commemorative messages. Another carried medical supplies including bandages, lint, medicines, and salts.

Suddenly rocket mail didn't seem quite so silly. Imagine a community isolated by a flood. A bridge has collapsed. A river is impassable. People on the opposite bank need medicine immediately. A small rocket doesn't require a bridge. It doesn't even need to land gracefully if its cargo is sufficiently protected. The same technology that had just entertained journalists by turning letters into airborne confetti contained the beginnings of an idea that remains recognizable today: sending critical supplies rapidly into places that conventional transportation cannot easily reach. Smith went further still...

On June 29, 1935, one of Stephen Smith’s rockets crossed the Damodar River carrying two living passengers... a rooster and a hen. They survived. For perhaps the first time in history, a chicken had experienced rocket transportation and presumably decided walking wasn’t so bad after all.

Smith’s experiments were part of a larger international fascination with rockets. Enthusiasts in Europe, India, and elsewhere saw possibilities in a technology whose eventual purpose remained wonderfully uncertain. And inevitably, the idea crossed into the United States.

Which brings us to a frozen lake, more than six thousand letters, and a rocket airplane named Gloria. In February 1936, hundreds of spectators gathered at Greenwood Lake along the New York–New Jersey border to witness an extraordinary experiment. Inventor Frido Kessler and his collaborators had developed a small, rocket-powered airplane, roughly six feet long, resembling an aircraft mounted on a rocket propulsion system. Inside were asbestos bags. Inside those bags was mail... a lot of mail: 6,148 pieces.

The plan was wonderfully American in its simplicity. Launch the rocket airplane from the New York side of Greenwood Lake. Fly across the state line. Land in New Jersey. Deliver the mail.

On February 9, approximately 500 spectators gathered on the frozen lake to watch history. A five-year-old girl named Gloria Schleick christened the craft, which shared her name, with a cup of snow. The rocket was prepared. The motor ignited. Flame erupted behind it. And the launching apparatus failed. Gloria didn’t go anywhere.

Another attempt got the craft moving, but it still failed to complete the intended journey. More than six thousand pieces of mail had essentially arrived at the world’s most elaborate post-office waiting room. But if Stephen Smith had demonstrated anything overseas, it was that rocket-mail enthusiasts were not easily discouraged.

Two weeks later, on February 23, they tried again. This time, two rocket airplanes successfully flew from the New York side of Greenwood Lake across the state boundary into New Jersey. The distances were hardly intercontinental. Contemporary reports described flights of only a few thousand feet, and one rocket came down less than a hundred yards beyond the state line. But that wasn’t the point. They had crossed it. The delayed mail was taken to the post office at Hewitt, New Jersey, where it received postal cancellation. America had successfully delivered mail across a state boundary using a rocket-powered aircraft.

For a brief moment, the future of postal transportation appeared to have arrived on a frozen lake trailing fire. It didn’t last. Rocket mail never became a practical competitor to trains, trucks, or airplanes. Rockets were expensive, difficult to control, potentially dangerous, and spectacularly unnecessary for delivering Aunt Margaret’s birthday card. The world eventually found considerably more consequential uses for rocket technology.

Yet it’s easy to laugh at the rocket-mail pioneers only because we know what happened next. They didn’t. Standing in 1931 or 1935, nobody possessed our hindsight. The technological future was still unwritten. Perhaps rockets would carry passengers between cities. Perhaps they would transport freight. Perhaps they would deliver medicine across inaccessible terrain. Perhaps they would carry newspapers over mountains. Perhaps the morning mail really would arrive by rocket.

Some experiments failed spectacularly. Some succeeded. Some left letters scattered across beaches and fields. But beneath it all was an astonishingly accurate intuition: rockets really were going to revolutionize human communication. They simply wouldn’t do it by carrying envelopes.

Within a few decades, rockets would carry satellites above Earth. Those machines would relay telephone calls, television broadcasts, and eventually enormous streams of digital information across distances that made Schmiedl’s mountains and Smith’s rivers seem tiny. The rocket-mail pioneers had imagined the rocket carrying the message. Instead, it carried the machine that would carry billions of messages.

Today, the surviving envelopes from those strange experiments are collectibles. Little paper witnesses to an era when the future was still being invented one explosion at a time. There are letters that crossed Austrian mountains, letters fired toward Indian beaches, letters that survived exploding rockets, letters that crossed from New York into New Jersey aboard a tiny rocket airplane while hundreds of people watched from a frozen lake.

They are artifacts from a wonderfully optimistic moment when people looked at one of humanity’s newest technologies and asked what it might someday accomplish. Most of their answers were wrong. But the question was exactly right.

And before rockets carried astronauts to the Moon, probes toward the planets, and satellites into orbit, there was a wonderfully eccentric generation of experimenters who looked toward the sky and dreamed of something considerably more ordinary.

They just wanted to deliver the mail. Preferably without exploding it...