Time, one could say, marches on

 

As the Postal Service's death rattle grows in volume, an article considers when all the mail was delivered on foot:

Teams of postmen often competed in popular walking competitions in the late 19th century. (Given the Lance Armstrong imbroglio, perhaps the post office should have avoided any dalliance with newfangled bicycles.) And individual postmen were regularly hailed in newspapers for the distances they’d had accumulated on foot during their appointed rounds. Typical was this headline in the Duluth News Tribune in 1915: “Five Times Earth’s Girth is Traveled by Postman; Duluth Man in Service Twenty-Eight Years, Invents Self-Adjusting Wrench.” (The “wrench” park: not so typical.) One London letter carrier, Thomas Phipps, was singled out for having walked 440,000 miles in between 1840 and 1898. Three decades earlier, one famous long-distance competitive walker named W.H. Smythe competed under the track name of “The American Postman.”