– How did pigeon post work in the old days?
In: 57
You can think of a carrier pigeon as a little capsule that stays attached to its home by a looooong, imaginary rubber band.
When you travel away from home, you take some of those pigeons that are attached to your home along with you. As you travel, those imaginary rubber bands stretch, but don’t break.
When you need to send a message home, you take a letter, attach it to the pigeon, and release it. When released, the imaginary rubber band snaps the pigeon and the message all the way back home, where people at home can find it and read it. At the time, this was much faster than any other practical means of sending messages.
Pigeons were not carrying messages back and forth like the owls in Harry Potter, if that was the idea in your head. Each pigeon was a single-use, one-way message transfer.
You can do two-way carrier pigeon communication, but it would mean taking pigeons from both ends and physically transporting them to the opposite end ahead of time. You could always keep a stock of moved pigeons at each location, prepped and ready to send messages at a moment’s notice, and have dedicated pigeon transporters resetting pigeons in the meantime. You’d still be sending people back and forth on foot for this, meaning they could also carry messages if needed. In this situation the usage of pigeons would be purely for burst speed. You’d save them for the most important messages that need to get somewhere FAST.
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