I'm on the street beside a battered red Lada that's burning oil. Almost all taxis in this city are Ladas. The windshield has been replaced by some cunningly arranged and epoxied pieces of sheet glass. It's early but stiflingly hot; I've already sweated through my shirt. More heat spews from the driver's window since he has to run the heater on full to keep the engine cool enough to function. The city smells of dust, wood smoke, burnt plastic, and fresh tortillas. It's the peak of the dry season.
The driver looks at me expectantly. I look at the business card in front of me and read out the strangest address I have ever seen. The driver grunts knowingly and we agree on a price. I put the piece of paper in my pocket and get in the stifling cab. We're off.
The history of business cards is, like the history of this city, a relatively short one. They emerged in the late 19th century as a distinctly American take on the visiting card and have since become a standard genre of business communication. They always include a name, relevant positions and qualifications, and -- most importantly -- contact information, including an address. The address on the business card in my pocket is particularly bizarre.
Addresses are an easy thing to overlook but they are really something very modern and part of history's move towards standardization and quantification. Before addresses, there was little public mail and it all functioned as a kind of general delivery system targeting local parishes or public houses.
The emergence of modern addresses
I lived in Nicaragua in the mid-1990s. Managua was a fascinating city that had been not-infrequently ravaged: by war, by breakdowns of civil order, and by earthquakes. The net result was, at the time, a rather tepid approach towards addresses. There were no global identifiers. Instead, addresses were all given from particular landmarks. For example, a restaurant would be located three blocks south of a particular store and half a block east. Of course, the Nicaraguans throw in a twist. Instead of east, they say ariba -- or "up" to refer to where the sun rises -- and for west they say abajo -- or "down," where the sun sets. And in Managua, they don't say north; it's al lago or "towards the lake"… which is a problem if you don't know where the lake is. The other challenge is that people will use landmarks that don't actually exist anymore. Hence, a valid address could be Donde fue Lacmiel, 2 cuadras ariba, 1/2 cuadra al lago (or "where Lacmiel was, 2 blocks towards the rising sun, and 1/2 a block towards the lake").1
This system of addresses seems a bit archaic now but it was common everywhere before the advent of what we consider to be modern street numbers. At the time, instead of addresses domiciles had proper names. North Americans snicker at British homes called The Old Vicarage, Rose Cottage, The Orchard, or The Meadow. But this quaintness was a feature in the pre-modern world. 2
Modern addressing starts in the mid-18th century, gaining a foothold in Prussia. Standard addresses and house numbering is a relatively new development. As noted by Tantner (2009) and Rose-Redwood (2008), house numbering didn't emerge as a kind of public service for better-orienting local people; it was a way to administer taxation, public policing, and military conscription. Tellingly, some of the earliest mandates for house numbering applied to the Jewish sectors of Prague in 1727. The "French System" of odd/even house numbering that we're now familiar with was introduced to Paris in 1805 (but was in use in Philadelphia in 1785). House numbering really wasn’t common until the mid-1800s, when the forces of modernity kicked in properly.3
House numbering became a standard thing at about the same time as home delivery of mail. The Royal Mail of the UK has existed since 1516, when Henry VII established the Master of the Posts. James I/VI was particularly keen on the post as a way of establishing a link between his two capitols of Edinburgh and London. It wasn't available to the public until 1635 but, at the time, was horribly inefficient and expensive. The mail initially operated as a receiver-pays system. If the receiver didn’t want to pay, they would just dodge the postman.
American mail followed a similar trajectory. Britain had established a government-run system for America in 1692. It was reformed by none other than Ben Franklin, the postmaster general of Philadelphia from 1737 until 1753 when he became deputy postmaster of the colonies. His reforms included the establishment and maintenance of post offices and post roads with standard mileages. Postage was based on the sheets of paper sent and the distance the letter traveled. He lowered prices and made the service available to all colonists. He turned the mail from a money-losing enterprise to a profitable one. Home delivery was not, however, common until after the Civil War and, presumably, the introduction of standard home addresses.4
Receiver-pays remained a sub-optimal system that was prone to abuse. In the UK, MPs could send letters for free and would "frank" the letters of friends, family, and other confreres. People also developed coded systems to avoid paying for post. For example, a letter addressed to "Mr. T. Smith" could signify that the sender was good and there is no need for further details. A letter addressed to "Thomas Smith," however, would include urgent information. The receiver would have no need to pay for the first letter but would want to pay for the second.
While Franklin did wonders to standardize the mails in America, it was a British innovation that created what we now have. In the 1830s, Rowland Hill -- a former schoolmaster -- advocated for a sender-pays system, what became known as Uniform Penny Postage. In this system, the sender paid a penny to send a letter regardless of how far it had to travel. This approach brought in the modern paraphernalia of our modern system: postcards, pre-printed postage-paid letter forms, and -- most notably -- postage stamps. To this day, British stamps are the only ones that don't actually say what country they're from.
Uniform Penny Postage revolutionized mail delivery in the UK. Within a year, the volume of mail doubled and it doubled again within five years. Within 50 years, many urban areas supported multiple mail deliveries every day and senders could expect a response by "return of post."5
But not in mid-90s Managua.
Bottom Line: Modern addresses were intentionally engineered to control populations. In the process, they gave us the modern mail and, ultimately, the business card and the Rolodex.
Notes
For a great discussion of Nicaraguan addresses, see https://vianica.com/nicaragua/practical-info/14-addresses.html.
See a list of common names at https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/property/586565/Top-50-house-names-Britain
I find myself increasingly writing about the mid-1800s as a kind of inflection point in our world. Everything pre-1850 was the ancient past while everything after it is our modern world. I generally use two signposts for our modern world: either the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London or perhaps the Cambridge Rules of 1848 for the game that was to become known as association football or soccer.
Diane Bernard (2021) summarizes Franklin's involvement with the post office.
Harford (2019) discussed the importance of the Penny Post as part of his 50 Things that Created the Modern Economy series.
References
Bernard, Diane. “What Would Ben Franklin, Our First Postmaster General, Think of Louis DeJoy?” Washington Post, 21 Aug. 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/08/22/benjamin-franklin-postal-service-louis-dejoy/. Accessed 19 Feb. 2021.
Harford, Tim. “The Penny Post Revolutionary Who Transformed How We Send Letters.” BBC News, 13 Aug. 2019, www.bbc.com/news/business-48844278. Accessed 8 Feb. 2021.
Rose-Redwood, Reuben S. "Indexing the great ledger of the community: urban house numbering, city directories, and the production of spatial legibility." Journal of Historical Geography, vol.34, no.2, 2008, pp.286-310.
Tantner, Anton. "Addressing the houses: the introduction of house numbering in Europe." Histoire & mesure, vol.24, no.2, 2009, pp.7-30.
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