BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Natl Postal Museum -- Exhibit (Case): Letters With Wings (Preview)

DC -- Natl Postal Museum -- Exhibit (Case): Letters With Wings (Preview):

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Description of Pictures: Letters With Wings: The Dream of Airmail, 1918-1938
In 2018, the National Postal Museum will celebrate the 100th anniversary of regularly scheduled airmail by presenting a special exhibition tentatively titled "Letters With Wings".
These cases contain a sampling of the material that will be included and the themes to be addressed.

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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[1] WINGS_170405_01.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[2] WINGS_170405_05.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[3] WINGS_170405_09.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)
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[7] WINGS_170405_31.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[8] WINGS_170405_33.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[9] WINGS_170405_36.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)
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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. WINGS_170405_01.JPG: Letters With Wings: The Dream of Airmail, 1918-1938 In 2018, the National Postal Museum will celebrate the 100th anniversary of regularly scheduled airmail by presenting a special exhibition tentatively titled "Letters With Wings". These cases contain a sampling of the material that will be included and the themes to be addressed.
2. WINGS_170405_05.JPG: Pilots Pilot Eddie Gardner poses with a Curtiss JN-4H "Jenny" mail plane in leather leggings, helmet, and goggles. Heavy gear was required year-round to protect pilots from the elements. They routinely flew at altitudes of 5,000-8,000 feet in open cockpits. Photograph of airmail pilot Eddie Gardner, c 1918
3. WINGS_170405_09.JPG: Thompson died in a mail crash on September 27, 1923, fifteen months after his last entry. Pilot Harwell Thompson's log book, January 29, 1918 - June 17, 1922
4. WINGS_170405_16.JPG: Promotion During the early years of airmail service, many Americans remained unconvinced that it was worth the added cost relative to ordinary postage rates. Advertising images such as this one depicting letters raking flight helped promote airmail service as efficient and modern. Advertising poster, c 1949-1958
5. WINGS_170405_18.JPG: From May 15-31, 1938 Postmaster General James A. Farley and he nation celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the first airmail flights with National Airmail Week. Congratulatory messages poured in to postal headquarters from all over the country, all of them flown by air. National Air Mail Week was intended to demonstrate that the service was no longer experimental, but had instead become the backbone of the American mail system. James A. Farley with National Air Mail Week letters, 1938
6. WINGS_170405_31.JPG: Letters with Wings The Dream of Airmail, 1918-1938 In less than two decades, the Post Office Department developed airmail from an experimental service into a profitable business an, in the process, laid the foundations of today's civilian airline industry. By 1938, the airmail network's spanned the entire country and extended to more than three dozen foreign countries. In 2018 the National Postal Museum will celebrate the 100th anniversary of regularly scheduled airmail by presenting a special exhibition tentatively titled "Letters With Wings." These cases contain a sampling of the material than will be included and the themes to be addressed.
7. WINGS_170405_36.JPG: Airmail Envelopes Red- and blue-bordered airmail envelopes were introduced on August 1, 1928 in response to customer complaints that some airmail letters were not being conveyed by plane. Postal clerks who sorted thousands of envelopes an hour did not always notice airmail postage, and the patriotic border was intended to catch their eye. The officially approved design featured shapes that are variously described in period documents as diamonds, lozenges, and parallelograms. This was not a requirement, however, and many colorful and striking variations can be found, such as these checkerboard and sawtooth patterns.
8. WINGS_170405_41.JPG: This letter survived an airmail plane crash at Marquette, Nebraska in February 1928 and was delivered. Airmail wreck cover, 1928
9. WINGS_170405_46.JPG: The United States issued this stamp to mark the Graf Zeppelin's 1933 visit to the Chicago World's Fair, and many copies were used to send souvenir mail on the flight. 50c "Graf Zeppelin" die proof, 1933
10. WINGS_170405_48.JPG: Airmail Stamps A transcontinental system of lighted airway beacons made night airmail possible in the 1920s. The Post Office Department issued a red and blue stamp depicting one of these beacons, located in Wyoming's Rocky Mountains, on July 25, 1928. 5c Beacon on Rocky Mountains plate proofs, 1928
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Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [(Smithsonian) Postal Museum] [Display ALL (Smithsonian) Postal Museum photos] [Museums (History)] [Museums (Other)]
2017 photos: Equipment this year: I continued to use my Fuji XS-1 cameras but, depending on the event, I also used a Nikon D7000. Trips this year: Civil War Trust conferences in Pensacola, FL, Chattanooga, TN (via sites in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee) and Fredericksburg, VA, a family reunion in The Dells, Wisconsin (via sites in Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin), New York City, and my 12th consecutive San Diego Comic Con trip (including sites in Arizona). For some reason, several of my photos have been published in physical books this year which is pretty cool. Ones that I know about: "Tarzan, Jungle King of Popular Culture" (David Lemmo), "The Great Crusade: A Guide to World War I American Expeditionary Forces Battlefields and Sites" (Stephen T. Powers and Kevin Dennehy), "The American Spirit" (David McCullough), "Civil War Battlefields: Walking the Trails of History" (David T. Gilbert), "The Year I Was Peter the Great: 1956 — Khrushchev, Stalin's Ghost, and a Young American in Russia" (Marvin Kalb), and "The Judge: 26 Machiavellian Lessons" (Ron Collins and David Skover). Number of photos taken this year: just below 560,000.
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