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Over the centuries, mail has been delivered by human beings traveling on foot, or riding domesticated animals such as horses or mules. Australians even used camels. Later, mail was transported with animals pulling conveyances like wagons or stagecoaches, across oceans via sailing vessels and steamships, by paddlewheeled boats up and down rivers, and packet boats on canals. And by locomotives on railroads, sometimes using specialized cars where the mail was sorted en route. With the advent of the automobile age, cars and trucks became widely used. In fact, my Grandpa Mendy (Joe Mendenhall) began his job as a rural mail carrier by driving his own Model T up and down the gravel roads around Fowler, Indiana. Besides carriers%u2019 personal automobiles, the Post Office Department has also used a variety of its own vehicles, including Highway Post Offices, where mail was sorted and organized between destinations.Then came air mail%u2014the subject of this collection%u2014with the first lighter-thanair craft used to transport mail being balloons. These were followed by gliders and dirigibles and blimps%u2014and Germans used rockets in the 1930s. Of course, many of the early flights were experimental. It was the invention of airplanes that made air mail routine. Although not an official Post Office route by any means, letters have been carried into space and back by astronauts, and some have been to the moon. There was a particularly significant event in the history of air mail that occurred in Indiana%u2014the first officially sanctioned air-mail flight in the United States. It occurred on August 17, 1859, when professional balloonist John Wise lifted off at 2:00 PM from a vacant lot near the gas works in Lafayette, piloting a balloon named Jupiter, and planning to fly all the Launching of the balloon Jupiter.way to New York City. The Lafayette Daily Couriersaid the crowd was %u201cthe largest ever assembled at Lafayette on any occasion,%u201d and Wise%u2019s estimate was %u201cnot less than 20,000 persons.%u201d However, judging by the numbers of people visible in a photograph of the ascent, Wise seems prone to exaggeration. Jupiter carried aloft 123 letters and some circulars inside a mail bag that had been locked by Lafayette%u2019s postmaster, Only know letter carried on the Jupiter air-mail flight.