Railroad Parcel Room Stamp This railroad parcel room stamp was made around 1910. Employees of the post office in a railroad station used it to stamp the date and time on someone’s package. This particular brand of time clock was also used as a time stamp to record the shifts of a company’s employees. It has a ribbon that rotates when the dials are turned. This piece of fabric is inked, presumably routinely when it was in use. The user places a card over the ribbon, and pushes the stamp onto the card, and the date and time are inscribed on the paper. Originally, this parcel stamp came with a key, with which the postmaster would wind the clock. Only the key (or another piece of equipment like it) could wind the clock, which would prevent others from changing the time. The clock is made of cast iron, and has brass inner workings. The stamp still works, and the ribbon is well inked. If you press a piece of paper underneath, you will see that the clocked stopped at 8:24 PM on April 31, 1941. For context, this was the day the U.S.S.R. signed a non-aggression treaty with Japan, in the middle of World War II. It was also Easter Sunday. The clock face tells us that Follett Time Recording Co. made this piece. I was unable to find much information on this company, but I gathered some information from a collector on eBay. W. I. Follett started the company, and created the design for the time stamp. He died in 1908, having made very little money off of the clock. Follett Time Recording Co. filed in New York as a company on October 3, 1907. Follett is still listed as an active company, but it has no presence on the Internet, which suggests that it is no longer producing anything. The last record I can find of Follett Time Recoding Co. is in May 1922, in the Buyer’s Directory in the sixty-third volume of Factory and Industrial Management. It is likely that these clocks stopped being made and used around then. The only thing we know about this particular railroad parcel stamp comes from the person who donated it to the museum. Roland Beilfuss, who collected clocks, said the clock was used as a parcel stamp at a railroad station. As the geographical range of Follett Time Recording Company is not known, we can only guess as to where this stamp was used. Perhaps it was part of the parcel room in a Grand Rapids station. In any case, this stamp was probably used to make tags for mail being put on a train. When the package arrived at its location, the stationmasters would know when it had left. It is also possible the machine was used as it was originally intended: as a time stamp for employees. Upon entering the station, the workers might stamp their arrival times on a card, and again when they left. Our modern post office system is actually very similar to mailing in the early 1900s. Someone takes the letter to the post office, where it is processed and sorted, then put into some kind of transport, and taken to another post office. The workers at that post office make sure the letters and packages get to individual homes. In the modern age, trucks and airplanes carry letters between post offices. In 1910, however, trains carried the packages. The letters would be put into large sacks, dumped out onto the train car, and sorted into bags in the mailing compartment. Mail delivery by trains was out of fashion around the 1920s. The post office eagerly switched over to air delivery in about 1918 (the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk was in 1900), which was about when time stamps from the Follett Time Recording Co. stopped being used. The clock in the Grand Rapids Public Museum probably stopped being used commercially around that time as well, though it continued to tick in the homes of collectors until 8:24 PM on April 31, 1941. Grace Bolt, 11/5/2015