Today’s headline was served to me on a silver platter. A great visual. An interesting story. And an even better history of something nearly forgotten. First though, the description under the image in the July 7th, 1926 newspaper:

"The carrier pigeon has joined the navy. Further, he's shipping on submarines. The birds are put in sealed traps which float to the surface and open automatically, as the diagram above shows, allowing the bird to fly in with his message. The bird shown above is named J. T. Sullivan, and is one of the navy's fastest carriers. Inset shows a sailor launching a pigeon on its flight."

J.T. Sullivan. One of the navy's fastest carriers. Shipping on submarines.

Submarines in 1926 had a communication problem that hasn't entirely gone away, but was considerably more acute before the age of satellite and encrypted radio. When you're submerged, you're silent. No signal in, no signal out. If something goes wrong — if you surface and need to report a position, a contact, an emergency — you need a way to get a message to shore that doesn't require technology that doesn't exist yet or equipment too large to carry.

The Navy's answer, at least in part, was a sealed waterproof trap. The pigeon goes in. The trap is released. It floats to the surface on its own and opens automatically. The pigeon, now at sea level with a message attached to its leg, does what pigeons do: it flies home.

This sounds like an improvised solution to an impossible problem. It was actually the product of decades of serious institutional investment. The Naval Academy at Annapolis established the Navy's first pigeon breeding and training program in 1891. In 1896, the Navy officially created the U.S. Naval Pigeon Messenger Service, with lofts at Boston Navy Yard, Portsmouth, Newport, Brooklyn, Key West, and Mare Island. They published a training manual. They specified the diet: fifty percent Canada peas, twenty-five percent Argentine corn, fifteen percent Kaffir corn or milo maize, ten percent whole rice. They specified bathing schedules. They had an official enlisted rating — Quartermaster (Pigeon) — for the sailors who trained and handled the birds.

In World War I, Navy pilots flew seaplanes on anti-submarine patrol along the French coast and carried pigeons with them as emergency backup to their radios. Wireless radio sets of the era were large and unreliable; if a pilot went down at sea, the pigeons were often the only way anyone would know where to look. On November 22nd, 1917, Ensign Kenneth R. Smith and his crew crashed in foggy weather off Le Croisic, France. They released their pigeons. A search crew was dispatched. Smith and his crew were recovered.

The birds kept working through World War II, this time on blimps conducting coastal anti-submarine patrol. The tactical logic was specific: Navy K-class blimps could hover for hours over a suspected submarine contact, but any radio transmission would alert the U-boat, which would dive before the destroyers arrived. The pigeons carried contact reports in small capsules attached to their legs — black capsules for routine messages, red for emergencies — silently, at sixty miles an hour, with no signal for the submarine to detect.

More than 95 percent of messages carried by homing pigeons during World War II were successfully delivered.

The official Navy enlisted pigeon trainer rating — Specialist (X) — wasn't phased out until 1961. By that point the United States Navy had nuclear submarines. USS Nautilus had already passed under the North Pole. The Polaris missile had already been launched from a submerged submarine. And there was still, somewhere in the organizational chart of the United States Navy, a rating for the man whose job was the pigeons.

J.T. Sullivan, one of the navy's fastest carriers, shipping on submarines in 1926, was not an anomaly or a novelty. He was part of a system that had been in continuous operation for seventy years and wouldn't officially end for another thirty-five.

Some things work until they don't. Some things keep working longer than anyone expects.

Cutting Room Floor (for subscribers)