Pigeon post
[3] Naval chaplain Henry Teonge (c. 1620–1690) describes in his diary a regular pigeon postal service being used by merchants between İskenderun and Aleppo in the Levant.
The Dutch government established a civil and military system in Java and Sumatra early in the 19th century, the birds being obtained from Baghdad.
Reuter had previously used pigeons to fly stock prices between Aachen and Brussels, a service that operated for a year until a gap in the telegraph link was closed.
After pigeon post between military fortresses had been thoroughly tested, attention was turned to its use for naval purposes, to send messages to ships in nearby waters.
Although the British Admiralty had attained a very high standard of efficiency, it discontinued its pigeon service in the early 20th century.
In modern days, a rafting photographer still uses pigeons as a sneakernet to transport digital photos on flash media from the camera to the tour operator.
Barely six weeks after the outbreak of hostilities, the Emperor Napoleon III and the French Army of Châlons surrendered at Sedan on 2 September 1870.
As had been expected, the normal channels of communication into and out of Paris were interrupted during the four-and-a-half months of the siege, and, indeed, it was not until the middle of February 1871 that the Prussians relaxed their control of the postal and telegraph services.
Although a number of postmen succeeded in passing through the Prussian lines in the earliest days of the siege, others were captured and shot, and there is no proof of any post, certainly after October, reaching Paris from the outside, apart from private letters carried by unofficial individuals.
For an assured communication into Paris, the only successful method was by the time-honoured carrier-pigeon, and thousands of messages, official and private, were thus taken into the besieged city.
Immediately, a watchman relieved it of its tube which was taken to the Central Telegraph Office where the content was carefully unpacked and placed between two thin sheets of glass.
The interval between sending a private message and its receipt by the addressee depended on many factors: the density of telegraphic traffic to and from the sender's town, the time taken to register the message, to pass it to the printers where it was assembled with its 3000 companions into a single page, and then to assemble the pages into nines or twelves or sixteens.
The pigeon post between look-out stations at lighthouses on islands and the mainland at the citadel in Halifax, Nova Scotia provided a messenger service from 1891 until it was discontinued in 1895.
They made the 48-mile passage in about one hour, bringing letters, news clippings from the Los Angeles Times, and emergency summons for doctors.
[8][9] Before the pigeon post service was established the only regular connection between the community on Great Barrier Island (90 kilometres northeast of Auckland) and the mainland was provided by a weekly coastal steamer.
The island's isolation was highlighted when the ship SS Wairarapa was wrecked off its coast in 1894, with the loss of 121 lives, and the news took several days to reach the mainland.
[11] During the centenary celebrations of the Indian postal service in 1954, the Orissa police pigeons demonstrated their capacity by conveying the message of inauguration from the President of India to the Prime Minister.
