

This postal worker, a Philadelphia based Postal Inspector by the name of Robert Moon, came up with the idea of a national three digit code that could be used to assign different locales around the country – originally attached to major cities and the rural areas surrounding them – in 1944. Though the United States Postal Service (in one form or another) has been delivering mail to addresses all over the country since before America even was a country, our ZIP Code system wasn’t actually first introduced until the 1960s.īut we’ll get to that a little more in depth in just a moment.įirst, it’s important to actually go over what a ZIP Code is and why it is such a huge part of our mail system today.Ī ZIP Code – or a Zoning Improvement Plan Code – was cooked up originally in the early 1940s when a postal worker recognized just how difficult it was to locate different packages, parcels, and envelopes across our great country with any real efficiency. Well, by the time you are done with the inside information below you’ll not only know whole lot more about the history behind the ZIP Code (and what an interesting history it is) but you also know how ZIP Codes are assigned, whether or not there are any special ZIP Codes out there, and a bunch of other little factoids about this crucial part about mailing system that might be helpful on a trivia night contest! We are all just so used to including these kinds of codes somewhere on our address label that leaving them off – or not even having them in the first place – feels completely and totally foreign. In fact, it may surprise you to learn (just a minute) about how relatively brand-new ZIP Codes are in the grand scheme of things – as well as why they were created in the first place.Ī huge cornerstone of our modern mailing solution these days, it’s really hard to imagine what it would be like to send a package, a parcel, or a piece of mail without a ZIP Code attached. ZIP Codes are just part of our normal everyday life at this point in the United States, but they weren’t always around.
