As we head into the next few years, America will be experiencing more and more 250th anniversaries. Unlike the bicentennial we went through in 1976, these events will apparently be called by a number of different names (take your pick): semiquincentennial, sestercentennial, bisesquicentennial, or just quarter-millennial (I'm sure we'll all settle on one of these, by next July 4th). In any case, and whatever you call it, last Saturday was the 250th birthday of what became today's United States Postal Service.

You'll note that this predates America's independence. This was due to Britain not caring a great deal about colonists being able to easily mail things to each other. The nation's first postmaster general (before we even had a nation) was Benjamin Franklin, who did care a great deal about such things (and who had served in the British postal service for the colonies). He was named by the Second Continental Congress to this position, making our postal service older than the United States of America. Later, the position of postmaster general was even elevated to a cabinet-level appointment.

The importance of the U.S.P.S. really cannot be overstated, because they were so instrumental in so many developments in our nation that it's hard to even list them all. The first "post roads" were in many cases the first roads, period. Back then, people mostly got around by sailing from port to port, or up rivers. Horseback travel was a lot more difficult (seeing as how there were no roads, for the most part), so the development of such a road network helped tie together the 13 colonies in a way they hadn't experienced previously.

The most famous of the land routes in postal history wasn't actually created by the post office, it was a private effort by Wells Fargo. At a time when getting a letter from the East Coast to the new boom territory of California took two to three months (due to having to sail it around the southern tip of South America), the Pony Express cut that time down to 10 days. The Pony Express route stretched from Missouri to California, but was only actually in existence for a year and a half (until late in 1861), because of the intervening Civil War and because the telegraph and (eventually) the transcontinental railroad made it obsolete.

Which brings up more postal history: the first public telegraph lines (between Washington D.C. and Baltimore, later reaching to New York and Boston) were owned and operated by the post office.

Developments that we all take for granted today actually took a while to emerge, though. The free delivery of letters to private homes inside cities didn't start until 1863, for instance, when Cleveland decided to begin the service out of compassion, since women had been "lined up daily at post offices, awaiting word" on whether their loved ones had been killed in the Civil War. Rural free delivery didn't get underway in a big way until the turn of the 20th century, however.

One of the biggest contributions to technology, however, was the post office essentially underwriting the creation of commercial air travel. After World War I, there were plenty of airplanes (little biplanes, for the most part) and plenty of pilots, but they didn't have a whole lot to do. They tried to eke out a living "barnstorming" (what later would morph into "air shows"), but it didn't really pay the bills. Individual companies tried to set up air services on routes they thought would be financially successful, but few of them were (and accidents were frequent, meaning few members of the public would entrust their lives to these operations). But the post office stepped in and started "air mail" service between certain cities (the first regularly scheduled route began in 1918), which gave the newly-created private airlines a steady source of income. This, more than anything else, helped commercial aviation (can't resist the pun) truly get off the ground.

Later, this even led to the development of planes capable of flying across the oceans (strangely enough, the first transoceanic route was over the Pacific, from San Francisco to the Philippines -- Atlantic service came later, even though the distance involved was far shorter). As had initially happened with commercial aviation, most of what the first of these flights carried was mail (most of it mailed by stamp collectors, so they could have "the very first" of such letters in their collections).

But the contributions to American progress weren't limited to technology. One of the key features of the beginnings of the postal service were postal rates for newspapers that were so low they were easily affordable. At the time, there were no "wire services" (like the Associated Press, for instance), so what generally happened was any small newspaper anywhere in America subscribed to as many of the bigger papers as they could, and then they just reprinted articles from them to fill up their own pages. Even the bigger papers in cities did a lot of this too, so an article initially published in Boston (for instance) would make its way down the coast until people far to the south got a chance to read the same article. Pamphlets were also cheap to mail. This all led to an explosion of news-sharing among the colonies, which directly contributed to the public in all the colonies learning of what was happening in all of the others in a timely basis. This drew Americans together in support of (and in opposition to, to be fair) the Revolution. Without this easy way to exchange news, it would have been a lot harder for the fledgling nation to even forge a common identity.

For the first seven decades or so, mailing letters happened the opposite of the way it is done now. You would pop a letter in the mail and it would be delivered, and the recipient would be responsible for paying the postage. Stamps didn't exist in America until 1847, when the system began changing over to the pre-paid system we all know today (stamps were made mandatory by 1855). This, of course, gave rise to the geekiest of hobbies: stamp-collecting.

The first two stamps issued (a five-cent and a ten-cent stamp) featured a bust of George Washington and one of Benjamin Franklin. Eventually this expanded to include other past presidents and notable figures (although there was a 10-year stretch from 1908 onward where for some reason the post office reverted to issuing virtually all stamps in all denominations with just a bust of Franklin and Washington again).

The history of the images on stamps is a little window into politics, in a way. Stamps were issued for the commemoration of certain achievements and events (known as "commemoratives" as opposed to the regular stamps that still just featured somebody's face on them). So each era of stamps showed what America was proud of, at the time. This was at times an exercise of a very gentle sort of propaganda, and at other times a much more heavy-handed propaganda (during the Cold War, chiefly). Being a government agency, at times the government felt the need to promote patriotic messages on the stamps they sold.

The only restriction (which is no longer in force, sadly) on who could appear on a postage stamp for much of this history was that they could not still be alive. There were a handful of exceptions made, such as for the stamp commemorating the raising of the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima (which pictured four real-life American soldiers, as the movie Flags Of Our Fathers details). More recently, an iconic image of a firefighter in the wreckage of the World Trade Center was also allowed, even though he was still alive. These were allowed because the stamps were not celebrating the people themselves, but rather a much bigger and momentous event.

The post office went through its biggest change in 1970, when (after a strike by postal workers) the agency was transitioned to only a semi-governmental role and was directed to be self-financed. This was when it was rebranded as the "United States Postal Service."

Today, of course, the post office is used (or, more accurately, "not used") differently than before. What with the advent of email and texting and all the other various computer-centric ways of communicating, writing letters has almost gone the way of the horse and buggy. Delivering packages now constitutes the major part of what the U.S.P.S. does, and I recently heard one late-night comedian (could have been Seth Meyers, but I am too lazy to look it up) crack the joke: "The Postal Service unveiled some new stamps yesterday, which commemorate the time when people actually used stamps."

There probably will come a time when stamps go the way of the dodo, but we're not quite there yet. By the most widely-used cataloguing system (Scott), the recently-issued SpongeBob Squarepants stamp is numbered 6028. That's how many stamps the post office has ever printed, from 1847 to now (although only roughly, since subcategories do exist for some of the numbers). How many will they print in the next 250 years? That is anyone's guess, but it seems likely that no matter how the concept of "mail" changes in the upcoming centuries, the system begun by Benjamin Franklin will still be contributing to the communication and exchange of goods between American citizens (and the rest of the world, to boot) in some fashion or another. So I for one am glad to wish a very happy 250th birthday to the United States Postal Service, in thanks for all they have done for this country!

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant