Today we're going to discuss the history of the postal service. In the 19th century, letters were carried by stagecoaches, which were slow and unreliable. A major change came in 1840 with the introduction of the penny postage system in Britain, which made sending letters affordable for ordinary people. However, the real revolution occurred in the late 1800s with the expansion of railways, allowing mail to be transported much faster across long distances. This reduced delivery times from several days to just hours in some cases. Interestingly, the first airmail service began even earlier than many think, in 1911, in India, but it was not until the 1920s that airmail became commercially viable on a large scale.
❓ According to the lecture, when did airmail become commercially viable on a large scale?