明治商2015 II

Letter boxes in Britain have become an iconic symbol of the nation. They are recognized the world over and are frequently featured in tourist brochures, postcards and greeting cards. They are ( A ) after throughout the world to decorate gardens, offices and even ships. Britain was not, however, the first country to introduce letter boxes. In 1840 Uniform Penny Post1 was launched, marking a revolution in the way the postal system could be used. Rowland Hill's2 postal reforms opened up the postal system to almost every person in Britain. Use of the system multiplied rapidly and as a result the earlier methods of collecting, sorting and delivering letters had to change. Prior ( あ ) the introduction of letter boxes, there were principally two ways of posting a letter. Senders would either have to take the letter ( い ) person to a receiving house (effectively an early post office) or await the bellman. The bellman wore a uniform and walked the streets collecting letters from the public, ringing a bell to ( う ) attention.

Anthony Trollope, now more famed as a novelist, was ( B ) as a surveyor's clerk for the post office in the 1850s. His duties involved traveling to Europe, ( え ) he saw roadside letter boxes in France and Belgium. He proposed the introduction of such boxes in Britain. To that end, in 1852 three cast-iron3 pillar boxes were installed as a trial on the island of Jersey. Later that year another four were introduced on Guernsey, and two of those original boxes have survived until today. The trials were considered a success and boxes began appearing on the British mainland from 1853. During this initial period, design, manufacture and erection of boxes was the responsibility of local surveyors. This meant that no standard pattern was issued and it ( C ) in a variety of styles. In basic form, all boxes were vertical pillars with a small slit to receive letters. There the similarities ended. By 1857 horizontal, ( お ) than vertical, openings were taken as the standard. Flaps were installed over the openings to stop rain from entering and the openings were placed below caps that stuck out slightly.

The color of British letter boxes is as much a part of their iconic nature as any other feature. Today everyone knows that letter boxes are bright red, but the earliest boxes were painted green so as not to appear too unnatural in the landscape. This was so effective that people complained about the difficulty of finding the boxes. 'Hie post office investigated alternative colors and initially settled on chocolate brown. However, brown required an extra coat of varnish, making it more expensive than the other suggestion of bright red. The latter color was introduced in 1874 and it took ten years to complete the program of repainting. ( か ) has remained the standard color with only a few exceptions. In the 1930s special blue boxes were introduced for airmail letters and the post boxes in the home towns of the victorious British athletes in the London 2012 Olympic Games were painted gold. The reign of Queen Elizabeth has seen the greatest variety of boxes since the early Victorian experiments. In 1968 square sheet-steel4 boxes were tested but found to be ineffective. A cast-iron variant was launched in 1974 and some of these boxes are still in use. Though the square boxes were never as popular as the round ones, they were reintroduced in 1995 expressly for use by companies with bulk postings. More recently reinforced plastic boxes have begun appearing in shopping centers and supermarkets.

There have also been experiments conducted in the size of post boxes. In 1897 smaller boxes were designed to ( D ) the demand for convenience in Ixmdon squares. The boxes were made to be attached to lamp posts and were only large enough to accommodate small letters. These boxes soon began appearing in rural areas with a lower volume of mail, though they subsequently (8) disappeared from the London squares. Lamp boxes remain a regular feature of villages across Britain, often fitted to telegraph or lamp posts, or mounted on their own foundations. The size of these boxes and their openings has changed slightly over the years in order to increase holding capacity and to accommodate larger letters of the modern era.