Rocket Despatches at the Delhi Jamboree, 1937

1937 was an intriguing year for Delhi. The newly established capital hosted Baden Powell’s All India Scouts Jamboree, a festive event that brought scouts and guide groups from across India. The Delhi Jamboree was also a significant event for an Anglo-Indian man called Stephen Smith and his ‘Rocket Mail’ experiments. The stamp that you see above was one of several philatelic items put inside a rocket to demonstrate the power and future of ‘Rocket Mail’.

Stephen Smith, an Anglo-Indian man with an Indian mother and British father, was actually a trained dentist with a passion for rocketeering. Smith would go on to earn the title of the “father of Indian aerophilately”—the practice of sending mail via airborne methods. At the time, Rocket Mail was envisioned as a revolutionary technology—harnessing rockets to transport mail, and at times even small animals, across short distances(!) Though his experiments yielded mixed results until then, the Jamboree offered Smith a grand stage to ignite public imagination—particularly among children—with the possibilities of rocket science.

While Delhi’s tryst with rocket mail might seem straight out of a science fiction book, similar experiments were already underway in Germany and other parts of Europe from the 1920s. Smith and Delhi, then, were on the pulse of global scientific experimentation in the early 20th century—even as these experiments unfolded within imperial structures that often obscured who was permitted to innovate and who was left out of the narrative.

References: https://www.indianairmails.com/indian-rocket-mail.html

https://astrotalkuk.org/stephen-smith-and-leslie-johnson-development-of-rockets-during-the-1930s-and-letters-from-calcutta-to-liverpool/