Pigeon post is an obsolete method of sending messages by using homing pigeons. The method was used from antiquity until the early 20th century. The use of' homing pigeons to carry messages is as old as the ancient Persians from whom the art of training the birds probably came. The Greeks conveyed the names of the victors at the Olympic Games to their various cities by this means. Before the telegraph this method of communication had a considerable vogue amongst stockbrokers and financiers. The Dutch government established a civil and military system in Java and Sumatra early in the 19th century, the birds being obtained from Baghdad. The pigeon post which was in operation while Paris was besieged during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 is probably the most famous. Barely six weeks after the outbreak of hostilities, the Emperor Napoleon III and the French Army of Chalons surrendered at Sedan on September 2, 1870. The normal channels of communication into and out of Paris were interrupted during the four-and-a-half months of the siege. With the encirclement of the city on 18th September, the last overhead telegraph wires were cut the next day, and the secret telegraph cable in the bed of the Seine was located and cut on 27th September. For an assured communication into Paris, the only successful method was by the time-honoured carrier-pigeon, and thousands of messages, official and private, were thus taken into the besieged city. Pigeons were regularly taken out of Paris by balloon. Soon a regular service was in operation, based first at Tours and later at Poitiers. The first despatch was dated 27th September and reached Paris on 1st October, but it was only from 16th October, when an official control was introduced, that a complete record was kept. Major-General Donald Roderick Cameron, Commandant of the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario from 1888–1896, recommended an international pigeon service for marine search and rescue and military service. A pigeon post between look-out stations at lighthouses on islands and the mainland at the citadel in Halifax, Nova Scotia provided a messenger service from 1891 until it was discontinued in 1895.
Benjamin Kurtz Miller (1857-1928) was a Milwaukee attorney who donated the first complete collection of U.S. stamps ever assembled to the New York Public Library in 1925. Great rarities and philatelic items in the Benjamin Miller Collection are the One-Cent Z Grill (two copies known), the rarest of all U.S. stamps. Miller started late in life at the age of 61 when he bought one of the famous Inverted Jenny stamps in 1918. By the early 1920s, Miller was on the way to his ultimate achievement: collecting one of every U.S. postage stamp in the Scott catalogue of his day. He collected many varieties such as, color shades, frauds and forgeries, fresh unused stamps, and varied cancellations. The collection was displayed at the library for more than 50 years. However it was locked away after a theft of some items in 1977. Even though a bulk of the collection was recovered it did not come back on display until recently; some of the collection was at the National Postal Museum in 2006 and 2007.
Hawaiian Missionaries, are the first postage stamps of the Kingdom of Hawaii, issued in 1851. They came to be known as the "Missionaries" because they were primarily found on the correspondence of missionaries working in the islands. An astonishing lore surrounds this stamp: in 1892, one of its earlier owners, Gaston Leroux, was murdered for it by an envious fellow philatelist, Hector Giroux. Only a handful of these stamps have survived. The stamps went on sale October 1, 1851, in three denominations: 2-cent, 5-cent and 13-cent values. A 6-cent appeared later. The design was very simple, consisting only of a central numeral of the denomination framed by standard printer's ornaments, with the denomination repeated in words at the bottom. Although the stamps were in regular use until as late as 1856, of the four values issued only about 200 have survived, of which 28 are unused, and 32 are on cover. The 2-cent is the rarest of the Hawaiian Missionaries, with 15 copies recorded. When Maurice Burrus sold his 2-cent stamp in 1921 the price was USD$15,000; Alfred Caspary sold the same stamp in 1963 for $41,000, the highest price ever paid for a stamp at the time. The current estimated value of a mint copy is GB £450,000.
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