Courier

A courier is a person who delivers messages, packages, and mail.

Duties and functions

Couriers are distinguished from ordinary mail services by features such as speed, security, tracking, signature, specialization and individualization of express services, and swift delivery times, which are optional for most everyday mail services. As a premium service, couriers are usually more expensive than standard mail services, and their use is normally limited to packages where one or more of these features are considered important enough to warrant the cost.

Courier services operate on all scales, from within specific towns or cities, to regional, national and global services. Large courier companies include DHL, OCS, FedEx, DTDC, EMS International, TNT, UPS, and Aramex. These offer services worldwide, typically via a hub and spoke model.

Before the industrial era

In ancient history, runners and homing pigeons and riders on horseback were used to deliver timely messages. Before there were mechanized courier services, foot messengers physically ran miles to their destinations. To this day, there are marathons directly related to actual historical messenger routes. In the Middle Ages, royal courts maintained their own messengers who were paid little more than common labourers.

Foot

The foot (plural feet) is an anatomical structure found in many vertebrates. It is the terminal portion of a limb which bears weight and allows locomotion. In many animals with feet, the foot is a separate organ at the terminal part of the leg made up of one or more segments or bones, generally including claws or nails.

Structure

The human foot is a strong and complex mechanical structure containing 26 bones, 33 joints (20 of which are actively articulated), and more than a hundred muscles, tendons, and ligaments. The joints of the foot are the ankle and subtalar joint and the interphalangeal articulations of the foot.

An anthropometric study of 1197 North American adult Caucasian males (mean age 35.5 years) found that a man's foot length was 26.3 cm with a standard deviation of 1.2 cm.

The foot can be subdivided into the hindfoot, the midfoot, and the forefoot:

The hindfoot is composed of the talus (or ankle bone) and the calcaneus (or heel bone). The two long bones of the lower leg, the tibia and fibula, are connected to the top of the talus to form the ankle. Connected to the talus at the subtalar joint, the calcaneus, the largest bone of the foot, is cushioned inferiorly by a layer of fat.

Foot (hieroglyph)

The Ancient Egyptian Foot hieroglyph, Gardiner sign listed no. D58 is a side view of the human foot and the lower leg.

The foot hieroglyph is used in the Ancient Egyptian language hieroglyphs for the alphabetic consonant letter b.

Libation hieroglyph with foot and pot

One of the libation group of hieroglyphs uses the foot, surmounted with a vessel, issuing forth a libation.

The Egyptian hieroglyph alphabetic letters

The following two tables show the Egyptian uniliteral signs. (24 letters, but multiple use hieroglyphs)

Relief
(also shows 3rd "m"
vertical Baker's tool (hieroglyph)
(mostly used as preposition))

Relief
(also shows 3rd "m"
vertical Baker's tool (hieroglyph)
(mostly used as preposition))

External wall relief; (foot and leg hieroglyphs)

External wall relief; (foot and leg hieroglyphs)

Column relief

Column relief

See also

References

Sewing machine

A sewing machine is a machine used to stitch fabric and other materials together with thread. Sewing machines were invented during the first Industrial Revolution to decrease the amount of manual sewing work performed in clothing companies. Since the invention of the first working sewing machine, generally considered to have been the work of Englishman Thomas Saint in 1790, the sewing machine has greatly improved the efficiency and productivity of the clothing industry.

Home sewing machines are designed for one person to sew individual items while using a single stitch type. In a modern sewing machine the fabric easily glides in and out of the machine without the inconvenience of needles and thimbles and other such tools used in hand sewing, automating the process of stitching and saving time.

Industrial sewing machines, by contrast to domestic machines, are larger, faster, and more varied in their size, cost, appearance, and task.

History

Invention

Charles Fredrick Wiesenthal, a german-born engineer working in England was awarded the first British patent for a mechanical device to aid the art of sewing, in 1755. His invention consisted of a double pointed needle with an eye at one end.

Messenger

A messenger or courier is a person or thing that carries a message.

Messenger or Messengers may also refer to:

People

In science and technology

Biology and chemistry

Electronics and computing

Transport

Messenger (horse)

Messenger (foaled 1780) was an English Thoroughbred stallion bred by John Pratt and imported into the newly formed United States of America just after the American Revolution.

Breeding

Along with three other stallions, (Medley, Sharp, and Diomed), Messenger provided the type of foal, that was needed for the era of long distance (stamina and speed) racing popular in the early days of the American sport.

Messenger was a grey by Mambrino out of an unnamed mare (1774) by Turf. He was inbred to Cade in the third and fourth generations of his pedigree. Mambrino traced straight back to Blaze, the father of trotters. Messenger has crosses to all three of the Thoroughbred foundation sires, particularly Godolphin Arabian. Although his sire was a trotter, Messenger never ran a trot race. While still in England, he started in 16 flat races and won ten of them. Messenger's races, usually less than two and half miles, were mainly "match" races in which the side bets far exceeded the purse.

Microsoft Messenger service

Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger Service,.NET Messenger Service and Windows Live Messenger Service) was an instant messaging and presence system developed by Microsoft in 1999 for use with its MSN Messenger software. It was used by instant messaging clients including Windows 8, Windows Live Messenger, Microsoft Messenger for Mac, Outlook.com and Xbox Live. Third-party clients also connected to the service. It communicated using the Microsoft Notification Protocol, a proprietary instant messaging protocol. The service allowed anyone with a Microsoft account to sign in and communicate in real time with other people who were signed in as well.

In April 2013, Microsoft merged this service into Skype network; existing users were able to sign into Skype with their existing accounts and access their contact list. As part of the merger, Skype instant messaging functionality is now running on the backbone of the former Messenger service.

Background

Despite multiple name changes to the service and its client software over the years, the Messenger service is often referred to colloquially as "MSN", due to the history of MSN Messenger. The service itself was known as MSN Messenger Service from 1999 to 2001, at which time, Microsoft changed its name to .NET Messenger Service and began offering clients that no longer carried the "MSN" name, such as the Windows Messenger client included with Windows XP, which was originally intended to be a streamlined version of MSN Messenger, free of advertisements and integrated into Windows.