Pneumatic Mail

Pneumatic mail is another interesting innovative system to improve the speed of mail delivery. It used a system of pneumatic tubes in Rome, Milan, and Naples. There were special mail boxes designated for sending pneumatic mail. They were emptied several times a day by mail carriers and brought to the nearest post office – one that had a pneumtic tube terminal.

Pneumatic mail were sorted and put into the appropriate pneumatic tube carrier, the one that would terminate at the post office closest to the mail’s destination. On that end, a mail carrier would take the letter and hand-deliver it using a bicycle to the recipient’s address. The Italian post office has a video on YouTube showing this process.

The stamps you see on this page were required for pneumatic mail service. They were initially made available in 1913 and printed as late as 1927. I’m not sure how long the service was available in Italy. In the U.S., pneumatic mail service was available in a few major cities, including New York, where it lasted from 1897 until 1953.

Note

When I was in my early twenties, I worked for Merrill Lynch in New Orleans. At that time, they used a pneumatic system for brokers to send orders for stocks and bonds to the wire room. I was the wire room supervivsor. So, pneumatic mail elicits nostalgic memories for me. Probably as a result, I’ve been focusing lately on getting all of the pneumatic stamps. With an order I received recently, I now have all of these stamps. This page is complete with unused stamps.

Contains 11 spots: own 11 – 11 unused, 0 used.
Page is finished.
Album or Web Page Last changed Oct 28, 2022

Stamp Details

The table below lists information about the stamps shown on this page of Lighthouse’s stamp album. For more details about a particular stamp, click on its description. That will take you to the related web page of Colnect.

spot

own

catalog

subject

description

comment

Leoni Design

1.1	✓	PN1	Vittorio Emanuele III	10c (apr 1913) pneumatic, grey brown
1.2	✓	PN2	Vittorio Emanuele III	15c (sep 1921) pneumatic, purple
1.3	✓	PN3	Vittorio Emanuele III	30c (jun 1923) pneumatic, sky blue

Leoni; Overprint

2.1	✓	PN4	Vittorio Emanuele III 10c Overprinted	15c (jan 1924) pneumatic, brown
2.2	✓	PN5	Vittorio Emanuele III 10c Overprinted	20c (mar 1925) pneumatic, brown
3.1	✓	PN6	Vittorio Emanuele III 15c Overprinted	20c (mar 1925) pneumatic, purple
3.2	✓	PN7	Vittorio Emanuele III 30c Overprinted	40c (mar 1925) pneumatic, sky blue

Leoni; Without Overprint

4.1	✓	PN8	Vittorio Emanuele III	20c (oct 1925) pneumatic, purple
4.2	✓	PN9	Vittorio Emanuele III	40c (oct 1925) pneumatic, red

More Overprints

5.1	✓	PN10	Vittorio Emanuele III 20c Overprinted	15c (jun 1927) pneumatic, purple
5.2	✓	PN11	Vittorio Emanuele III 40c Overprinted	35c (jun 1927) pneumatic, red

Footnotes

Spot refers to the postion of the stamp on the album page (e.g., 3.2 indicates row 3, position 2).
Amt. is an abbreviation for the face amount of the stamp.
Own indicates the stamp status: ✓ for unused; ✗ for used or canceled; ⭑ signifies I ordered one; ; ✨ indicates it was bought recently; ✠ means an auction bid is pending; and ◎ is used, and it costs too much for unused.
To search by catalog number, go to the search box and enter it in the catalog number box. However, it’s a bit broken; I need to fix it.