All this talk about unmanned drones delivering your box set of the vampire diaries may have captured the imagination of those that like to think of a Futurama style society with all the tech you can imagine, but in fact cool delivery systems have been around for a long time. Ever since man discovered they didn't have to go and get something themselves they have invented more and more ways to get things brought direct to them with little effort and in funny ways. I can think of plenty of things I'd rather do deliveries than a rather flimsy helicopter so let's take a bit of a trip through history.
Medieval Messengers
So the first form of message delivery was to get someone of lower standing than yourself to go and deliver your letter, parcel or present. This was always a rubbish job, you spent most of your life living in fear that you may be delivering a rather nasty message which would lead to you being shanked like a freshly spitroasted chicken. The job was reserved for fit young men who could ride a horse and handle the treacherous and often brutal conditions on the journey. Lets face it, if it wasn't for civilisation and the human rights act we'd all love to have our own messengers, sending someone out into the pissing rain by horse to deliver your message may reduce the number of times you get a ONE WORD TEXT!
Telegraphy
This cut out the middle man, using electricity to save your legs by then it did end up being painfully annoying to have to go to a centrally connected place to send a message. Not much use to the outliers of the electric revolution. It was the basis for much of communication for decades and spawned a whole new world, in essence it was the first remote form of communication that could actually spell out words. Of course making a correction was a ball ache and you couldn't use sarcasm for fear of being misunderstood.
Pizza Delivery Bikes
During the 80's I believed that Pizza delivery was the sole job of any teenager who had a crap moped. In reality I have never had a pizza delivered by moped but that may have something to do with my living in the UK, the films I watched were always from Hollywood and the Yanks have some insane laws about letting kiddies drive cars on the actual fracking road! Still it appears this form of delivery lives on in the world of pornography, each teenager accepting the crap rates of pay in the hope of a flash from a gorgeous girl. In reality your more likely to be bitten by a rabid dog but good luck!
Owls
Owls have been very popular since Hogwarts shot their usefulness as delivery beasts into the public domain. Now the official ring bearers of many a wedding the life of an owl has become a commodity. More so we see that a rather forward thinking organisation like Waterstones has taken this opportunity to begin training owls to deliver books, after all an owl is much more exciting that an ex-US army drone that has been decommissioned but may still have that base programming to destroy all human life. If you want to read the announcement from Waterstones I suggest you visit the Q&A but remember they only just though of it this morning.
3D Printing
The idea behind this is actually that why should you have things delivered. Firstly the most ordered products from Amazon are CDs, DVDs and books, whats wrong with people, you can download or stream any of those things virtually and completely neutralise your carbon footprint! The eventual idea behind 3D printing is that you will be able to have a replicator in your own home to produce anything you can find the blueprints for on Google. So man reaches a new age of not ever having to even interact with someone ringing your doorbell, GREAT, YAY FOR HUMANITY!
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