Academic

Missile Mail, Silos, And The Case For University Service

By Dan Filler

When Drexel was considering starting a law school, way back about an hour and a half ago, existing faculty and staff were committed to creating a college that avoided the traditional academic silos.  People really wanted interaction between colleges and they imagined that law faculty and students would be popping up in interdisciplinary projects - research, teaching and service - constantly.  Not surprisingly, this isn't a simple task - particularly when everyone at the law school is plenty busy with the day to day work of institution building.  There are intellectual benefits, however, to getting out of the silo.

The other day, during a job talk for an Honors College faculty slot, I learned that a 1950's Postmaster General, Arthur E. Summerfield, aggressively pursued a "missile mail" project.  Figuring that rockets were particularly well suited to the delivery of mail, he conned the U.S. Navy into loading letters onto a Regulus cruise missile (with nuclear warhead removed) and shooting them off the USS Barbero submarine.  They were aimed at a naval station in Florida and in due course - 22 minutes - two rockets filled with commemorative first-day covers arrived at the base.

According to Wikipedia, Summerfield was apparently quite pleased, saying:

"This peacetime employment of a guided missile for the important and practical purpose of carrying mail, is the first known official use of missiles by any Post Office Department of any nation." Summerfield proclaimed the event to be "of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world," and predicted that "before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail."

Maybe we can relax the next time a North Korea launches a Taepodong-2; they're probably just improving their mail delivery! 

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on June 02, 2008 (boomark / email).