I was thinking abstractly about the fact that we trust complete strangers to get important and valuable packages from one location to another, and I wondered when this tradition began. When did we switch from personally-selected couriers to companies with unknown delivery personnel? Was it back on the Silk Road? Ancient Rome? Who came up with the idea first?
The UK’s Royal Mail has been around since 1660, but according to Wikipedia the idea of a “mail service” has been around since at least the days of Ancient Persia; certainly, the Romans and the Chinese had postal services for the average citizen to use.