How To Cook The Best Steak In The World - Part 2

How To Cook The Best Steak In The World - Part 2 by Mick Reade

PART 2:- Cooking To Perfection

The process of actually cooking your steak is quite simple, but there are a few key things you need to know to get the best result. Firstly, the advantage of using the chargrill means you can have nice cross-markings on your steak when it's finished, which looks fantastic for presentation. To achieve this, your steak will need to be turned three times, the first time straight over itself, then on the second turn spin it around 90 degrees so the lines from the grill will cross over each other and make little brown squares all over the steak, and then the third and final turn will be straight over itself again.

When you're finished the steak should have cross-markings on both sides, and you can choose whichever side looks best to serve facing up. What you should find if you have got the grill positioning right for your preferred doneness, 3-4 minutes in between each turn should have your steak turn out just the way you like it! (If you are cooking your steak bleu, you only need to cook it for 3 minutes on each side in total, just enough to seal each side basically).

This is just a guide to work by only, as each grill will produce slightly different results, but definitely the most important stage of cooking your steak is knowing when it is at the exact doneness you would like. This can sometimes be a little tricky, but there are a couple of methods for testing your steak without needing to cut into it.

The best method to use when you're just starting to learn would be what I call the "thumb test". Hold your left hand out open and relaxed, and press the flesh of your left thumb with your right index finger. It should feel quite soft, and this is how a rare steak should feel when you press it with your finger.

Now lightly touch your left thumb to your left index finger, and press the flesh of your thumb with your right index finger. This is how a medium-rare steak should feel when it's ready. Next, lightly touch your left thumb to your left middle finger, and pressing the flesh of your left thumb will feel like a medium steak when it's ready. Touching your left thumb to your left ring finger will make the flesh of your left thumb feel like a medium-well steak, and touching the left thumb to your left little finger will make the flesh of your thumb feel like a well-done steak.

Try this out as a guide to get you started, and as with all things, practice and experience will help you hone your ability and instincts to know just when your steak is cooked to perfection! And just as importantly, make sure you get feedback from every person that you cook a steak for, this will make your progress go much faster. As they say, "feedback is the breakfast of champions!"

Another method to use, which can be a little bit sneaky, is if you can see into the middle of the steak at the edges to see what colour the middle looks like. This works really well for a scotch fillet, as you can gently pull away part of the meat right where the C-shaped piece of fat is without damaging your steak, and see if the inside is red, pink or grey.

Now I will explain to you each doneness, so you can work out how you would like to cook it and so you know what to look for when it is finished. I will start with bleu, which is basically just sealed, is still very red in the middle, quite mushy to the touch, and will feel a little cool inside, only slightly warmed.

Rare is red in the middle from edge to edge, a little mushy, and will just feel warm inside. Medium-rare is red in the middle and pink at the edges, and will feel warm inside. Medium is pink in the middle from edge to edge, feels tender to the touch, and will be warm to hot inside. Medium-well still has a quarter in the middle that is pink, and will be grey at the edges, feels quite firm and is hot inside.

If you plan to cook your steak medium-well or above, I would suggest you could speed up the cooking time by using a steak weight to place on top of your steak. It should be shiny silver and kept clean, and what will happen is the heat coming up from the flames below will be reflected down on to the top of the steak so it cooks on both sides. Make sure if you use a steak weight that you only place it on your steak after sealing one side so there is no chance of cross-contamination. Well-done steaks are grey throughout, no pink at all, quite firm, although can still be juicy, and is very hot inside. Very well-done steaks are grey throughout with no pink at all, very firm, very hot, and no juices whatsoever.

You can also get your steak cooked Pittsburgh, which basically means charring the outside so it is burnt while the inside doesn't need to be completely cooked. For example, if you want to have your steak Pittsburgh-Rare, you could char the outside, and the inside would be red in the middle from edge to edge. To do this you will need some oil or butter, I personally use lemon butter just for the flavouring, and drizzle some over the steak until it drips onto the flames underneath. Your goal here is to build the flames up so they are licking at the steak and will cook the outside much faster than the inside.

CAUTION! Be very mindful of how much butter you use, make sure you have fire safety equipment, and if necessary that you have adult supervision. Do not do this if you do not feel comfortable working with large flames, it can be very dangerous if something nearby catches fire, so please be very careful if this is how you would like to have your steak cooked.

Everybody has different preferences when it comes to their beef, but I would urge you to try each different way so you can work out for yourself what's best for you. Many people fear the sight of blood coming out of their steak, if you can work up the courage to try something new for yourself, who know, you might find you really like it! I personally eat my steaks medium-rare, and would like to take this opportunity to mention that once your steak starts getting to medium-well and above, you really lose a lot of the nutritional benefits of eating beef, so I would recommend not cooking your steak any more than medium, but obviously that is a choice that is entirely up to you.

Now all that's left to do is to serve up your perfectly cooked steak, but first make sure you rest your steak for a minute or two away from the heat, so the juices inside settle and even themselves out through your steak. There are many choices of sides and sauces that can go with your meat, far too many to list here. I always love it with a creamy mashed potato and seasonal steamed vegetables, and my favourite sauce is mushroom sauce.

If you have the time the best sauce is made using beef bones, cooked off with a little tomato paste, then make a stock by boiling the bones in water with some celery, carrots, onion, leeks, bay leaves and peppercorns. Simmer it for a couple of hours until it reduces about three-quarters, and then remove the bones and vegetables. Add some red wine and port, and reduce it down to about half of where it is now, until it starts to thicken with a nice consistency. From here you can add some sliced mushrooms, or peppercorns if you prefer, and even add a little cream if you like as well. This is very time consuming to make the jus (rich beef gravy), but if you can do it you will find it well worthwhile. One other little tip I have for you is to brush a small amount of lemon butter over your steak before saucing it, this will keep your steak very juicy and tender. I hope you enjoy cooking and eating many steaks in the future, and make sure you go out and impress your friends with your newfound cooking skills!



Mick Reade is an Australian chef, who in 2001 was the winner of the Lonestar Steakhouse "Best Steak Cook in Australia" award, has cooked over 100,000 steaks during his career so far, and has been helping teach others how easy it can be to cook great tasting meals, for more information and recipes please visit http://www.alleasyfoodrecipes.com


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Global warming fantasies and the eco-cult of true believers!

Global warming fantasies and the eco-cult of true believers! by Craig Read

Hot off the UN presses – we will all die from a natural gas called Co2! Global Warming fantasies that the earth is becoming one giant microwave heated up by man’s pernicious and insatiable industrial development is of course ridiculous. The only consensus that exists on climate change is that if you believe anything the UN or Al Gore says, you are probably a moron and should exile yourself to the nearest forest to tree hugging duty. Al Gore and the UN on almost any topic, have the credibility level of Hugo Chavez when he opines on his socialist-democracy experiment.

Climate cycles are natural; they are complex with 1 million or so variables making up the climate and they exist independent of human activity. Even if you wiped out mankind you would only erase 4 % of the CO2 that makes up the supposedly scary ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions that will fry us all! Most of the so-called greenhouse gases are water vapor and are part of the earth’s naturally occurring cycle of heat transmission, conductivity and then cooling.

Asking Al Gore and the UN to model climate patterns is about as intelligent as asking a pre-schooler to build a car.

That utter gibberish such as man-made climate change is even called news says a lot about the mentality of our socialist-liberal culture. It gets really tiring trying to talk sense to eco-fascist pagans that are blinded by hate for modernity; can’t stand the thought of market based economics; and faint at the mention of the words ‘freedom’; ‘individuality’; ‘technological progress’; and tear out their hair if you tell them that our environment in all areas excepting the oceans, is in better shape and cleaner than at any time in history. The eco-fascists and Al Gore-lovers want nothing more than to manage the world; micro-manage society; destroy the modern industrial and technological processes that ensure a cleaner environment; and increase tax, regulation and bureaucratic hiring. None of these options is intelligent or necessary.

So after receiving some rather angry letters from the eco-left I decided to post a quick index of information on why the Globaloney Warming scam is malicious; ignorant and dangerous.

Destroying our modern world so politicians can engage in children’s exercises of ‘trading emissions credits’; transfer billions of dollars hither and yon; and create a massive socialist state complex that will impose itself on civilization is sheer insanity. Pagan cults are utopias. Islam, Hitlersim, Stalinism, Marxism in its various disgusting varieties, and now the eco-fascist cult, are at their core very similiar. In essence they demand mindless obedience, anti-Western orthodoxies, hatred of freedom and the market, and a commitment to lie, distort, pervert reality and facts. They are also primitive, violent and arrogant.

It would be better to put the little eco-fascists in their own sandbox with some plastic toys and let them play there; instead of allowing them to play with the modern world.

What follows is a quick index of sources countering the eco-fascist claim of man-made global warming. It only offends the eco-blind; the eco-deranged and the eco-fanatics who want to destroy civilization and create a pre-modern utopia.

=========
Bad Climate Science Yields Worse Economics, by Peter Malloy, October 26, 2006
in Friends of Science magazine.

A critical commentary on the "Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change"
Climate modelers pile guess upon guess to arrive at an answer that is rendered invalid by the historical temperature record. Recent research shows:

(1) Cosmic rays impact global climate.
(2) Carbon dioxide has limited physical capability to impact global temperature.
(3) Greenhouse myths are propogated by climate alarmists.

The Climate Change Debate, Professor S. Fred Singer
Stern Critque: The Climate Change Debate is far from Over, World Economics, Vol. 7, No. 3, July-September 2006

Dr. Singer poses three fundamental questions, then answers them:

(1) Is there evidence for or against an appreciable human contribution to climate warming?

There is a lot of evidence for past variation in climate with no human contribution at all. There is some evidence that human contributions may have a minor effect on climate warming. There is no overwhelming evidence of an appreciable contribution to global warming.

(2) Would a warmer climate be better or worse than the present one?

We know from voluminous records that the human condition was better in 1100 AD during the Medieval Warm Period than during the following Little Ice Age. We know that things are better now than during the 1970 recent cold period. We also know that the reason for improvement since 1970 was due to technological advances, not a warmer climate, and that is exactly the point: Technological advances and the mobilization of capital far outweigh any climate factor one can think of in promoting prosperity.

Most agree that a colder climate would damage the economy. Would that be true for a slightly warmer climate? Is our current climate the optimum, and would any change to either warmer or colder be damaging?

(3) Realistically speaking, can we really do something about climate? Is it possible to influence the climate by policy actions in an effective way?

The Kyoto Protocol fully realized yields a calculated reduction of one-twentieth of a degree. At what cost? Further, would the enormous costs required to reduce emissions by the 60 to 80 percent required to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide be worth the effort, particularly if the result of warming was beneficial?

Global Warming or Global Cooling? An excerpt, from The Times of India:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1034077.cms

Things were different in 1940-70, when there was global cooling. Every cold winter then was hailed as proof of a coming new Ice Age. But the moment cooling was replaced by warming, a new disaster in the opposite direction was proclaimed.

A recent Washington Post article gave this scientist's quote from 1972. "We simply cannot afford to gamble. We cannot risk inaction. The scientists who disagree are acting irresponsibly. The indications that our climate can soon change for the worse are too strong to be reasonably ignored." The warning was not about global warming (which was not happening): it was about global cooling!

In the media, disaster is news, and its absence is not. This principle has been exploited so skillfully by ecological scare-mongers that it is now regarded as politically incorrect, even unscientific, to denounce global warming hysteria as unproven speculation.

Bob Carter: British report the last hurrah of warmaholics
in The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20690289-7583,00.html
The Stern warning could join Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb and the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth in the pantheon of big banana scares that proved to be unfounded.

An accomplished cost-benefit analysis of climate change would require two things: a clear, quantitative understanding of the natural climate system and a dispassionate, accurate consideration of all the costs and benefits of warming as well as cooling.

Unfortunately, the Stern review is not a cost-benefit but a risk analysis, and of warming only.

Falsehoods in Gore's An Inconvenient Truth
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/environment/gore.html
Errors include:
* Misleading links between weather events and climate change
Climate is the average of weather conditions over long time periods; because the climate system is inherently variable, individual weather events are not indicative of trends. Nonetheless, Gore overwhelms the reader with many individual events, claiming this is global warming in action.

* Misrepresentation of data
Gore presents one graph, said to be temperature data derived from ice cores, to support the controversial claim of one research group--Mann et al.--that current temperatures are higher than anytime in the last 1,000 years. The graph is not the ice core data, however, but the Mann et al. data derived from tree rings and other proxies.

* Exaggerations about sea level rise
Gore claims that potential melting of ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctic will force the "evacuation" of millions of people to escape sea level rise of 6 meters (20 feet). This flatly contradicts even the worst-case scenarios described by the scientific community.

* Misleading claims about effects of climate change

Gore claims that the emergence of new diseases is related to global warming, but most of the diseases he lists have little or no relationship to climate.

* Reliance on worst-case scenarios
Much of the claims about the consequences of future global warming rely on climate models that Gore calls "evermore accurate", but significant questions about the reliability of these models remain, and the effects cited by Gore presume that the worse-case predictions of these models are the correct ones.

* False claims about scientific views on global warming

Despite the abundance of scientific research contradicting his position, Gore instead concentrates on refuting a handful of skeptical claims from outside the scientific community--and can't even get the facts right on those.

* Misleading claims about the responsibility of the United States
(Gore) criticizes the U.S. failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol without acknowledging the ways in which the Protocol disproportionately targeted the U.S. economy. Or that the Senate unanimously rejected Kyoto during the Clinton/Gore Administration.

* Conceptual errors
Gore's explanation of several topics, including the greenhouse effect, the relationship of carbon dioxide and global temperature, decline in Arctic Ocean pack ice, structure of the Greenland ice sheet, and ozone depletion, contain conceptual errors.

Al Gore's "science" is pretty sloppy, but of course, Al is not a scientist.
It shows.

Gorey Truths: 25 inconvenient truths for Al Gore, by Iain Murray
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmFiZDAyMWFhMGIxNTgwNGIyMjVkZjQ4OGFiZjFlNjc=
Murray lists 25 areas in which Gore is dead wrong. He could have listed 2500 but I guess he had better things to do then to educate another dumb politician.

Changes in Sea Level
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/409.htm
Projected sea level changes from 1990 to 2100: Including thawing of permafrost, deposition of sediment, and the ongoing contributions from ice sheets as a result of climate change since the Last Glacial Maximum, we obtain a range of global-average sea level rise from 0.11 to 0.77 m. This range reflects systematic uncertainties in modelling.

Will Sea Levels Rise 20 Feet As Gore Predicts?
http://www.cgfi.org/cgficommentary/Will-Sea-Levels-Rise

"(T)he world’s warming in the past 150 years has produced a change in Antarctica. The huge East Antarctic ice sheet, which contains nearly 90 percent of the world’s ice, has been thickening. European satellites measured the ice sheet’s thickness 347 million times between 1992 and 2003, and found it is gaining about 45 billion tons of water per year because the planet has warmed enough for snow to fall at the coldest place on earth.

"Thickening ice in the Antarctic, in fact, is just about offsetting the meltwater being released from the edges of the Greenland ice sheet—which has also been thickening in its center. This leaves us with a global warming sea level gain of about 1.8 millimeters per year—or 4 inches per century. The rise has remained constant during the 20th century despite the moderate 0.6 degree C warming of the planet."

The Real 'Inconvenient Truth', by Junkscience.com
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/
An excerpt:
"There seem to be a few things that your informant forgot to tell you -- like carbon dioxide being an essential trace gas that underpins the bulk of the global food web. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 15% seems to be the common number cited for the increase in global food crop yields due to aerial fertilization with increased carbon dioxide since 1950. This increase has both helped avoid a Malthusian disaster and preserved or returned enormous tracts of marginal land as wildlife habitat that would otherwise have had to be put under the plow in an attempt to feed the growing global population. … CO2 feeds the forests, grows more usable lumber in timber lots meaning there is less pressure to cut old growth or push into "natural" wildlife habitat, makes plants more water efficient helping to beat back the encroaching deserts in Africa and Asia and generally increases bio-productivity. If it's "pollution," then it's pollution the natural world exploits extremely well and to great profit. Doesn't sound too bad to us.

Greenlanders Like Global Warming
http://chinese-school.netfirms.com/forums/travel-to-greenland-vt13.html
Original article in the Wall Street Journal

An Excerpt:
For Greenlanders, adapting to the effects of climate change is nothing new. Oxygen isotope samples taken from Greenland's ice core reveal that temperatures around 1100, during the height of the Norse farming colonies, were similar to those prevailing today. The higher temperatures were part of a warming trend that lasted until the 14th century.

Near the end of the 14th century, the Norse vanished from Greenland. While researchers don't know for sure, many believe an increasingly cold climate made eking out a living here all but impossible as grasses and trees declined. Farming faded away from the 17th century to the 19th century, a period known as the Little Ice Age. Farming didn't return to Greenland in force until the early 1900s, when Inuit farmers began re-learning Norse techniques and applying them to modern conditions. A sharp cooling trend from around 1950 to 1975 stalled the agricultural expansion.

Behavior of the Greenland Ice Sheet
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V10/N2/EDIT.jsp

From the point of view of Global Warming True Believers, Greenland has been behaving rather badly. An excerpt:

... Greenland's thermal history has been incredibly volatile over the past century, with its mean near-surface air temperature rising between 2 and 4°C in less than ten years during the Great Greenland Warming of the 1920s (Chylek et al., 2004), which occurred over a period when the atmosphere's CO2 concentration rose by a grand total of only 3 or 4 ppm. And when Greenland temperatures began to fall in the 1940s, the air's CO2 content significantly accelerated its upward climb [my emphasis]. In addition, the most recent warming on Greenland - which climate alarmists describe as being unprecedented and driven by an even more unprecedented increase in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration - has resulted in coastal temperatures that Chylek et al. report are still "about 1°C below their 1940 values," which peak temperatures prevailed when the air's CO2 content was far less than it is today.

Detailed Chronology of Late Holocene Climatic Change, by James S. Aber
http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/ice/lec19/holocene.htm

Some excerpts that illuminate Global Warming that occurred over 1,000 years ago, and that caused higher temperatures and as great or greater glacier and ice retreat than has occurred to date or is credibly forecasted.

* 800-1000s: Aletsch and Grindelwald glaciers (Switzerland) were much smaller than today.
* 874: Settlement of Iceland began; Viking immigration from Norway, England, Ireland, Faeroes, etc. Glaciers of Iceland much smaller than today.
* 880-1140: Radiocarbon dates on trees that grew in Canada far north of modern timberline.
* 1000-1200: Rapid population growth in Estonia based on cereal grains--barley, rye, wheat. Northernmost region for crop tillage as the primary means of subsistence. Population by early 13th century at least 150,000 people (Tannberg et al. 2000).
* 1020-1200: Minimal sea-ice cover around Iceland.

The Medieval Warm Period was followed by a period of glaciation that engulfed settled areas throughout Europe, Iceland, and Greenland.

Glacier retreat started again at the end of the Little Ice Age.

* 1855: Signs of moderate retreats by Chamonix glaciers.
* 1860-80s: Evidence of pronounced glacier withdrawal all over continental Europe; many Alpine glaciers retreated >1 km by beginning of this century. Icelandic glaciers remained in advanced positions, however.
* early 1900s: Rapid retreat by glaciers on Mt. Kenya, Africa.
* 1920: Marked decrease in sea ice in coastal waters of Iceland.
* 1920-30s: Glaciers declined rapidly everywhere, except Antarctica; end of Little Ice Ages.

=====
These are a few of the many examples of global warming and cooling during the past 1200 years that were not caused or even influenced by the activities of man.

But please don’t alarm the eco-fascists and the wailing Marxists by trying to have a rational discourse and point out some obvious flaws in the man-made global warming theory.

Just strut and march along with the others, arm outstretched in the fuehrer salute eyes fixed upon Al Gore and the UN…….clutching your little eco-fantasy bible in your other hand.



After working for a few large IT firms Read born in 1966, is currently an entrepreneur and Venture Capital Advisor and Managing Consultant for Wireless and Mobile technologies [including the internet] and in particular, in software applications for the Wireless or Mobile Industry.
http://www.craigread.com/

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Promoting your Site with Branded Flash Games

Promoting your Site with Branded Flash Games by Adrian Kennelly

Developing and distributing original branded flash games has proven itself to be an innovative way to drive countless new visitors to your website. Games display your brand name throughout play-time; the brand will usually appear as a link at the bottom of the game window, but it could show up as merely a logo. Some aspiring webmasters develop original, branded games for their own sites while other webmasters pay flash game developers to just customize whatever the webmaster likes out of their collection. The flash game developer might customize the same game for several websites, leading to a ubiquitous presence of the game online - each with a different brand on display. Webmasters pay for flash games because visitors remain on the site for longer periods of time and may be more likely to click text ads or generate impressions for CPM ads. If they really like the site, they may tell their friends or come back day after day. These are concepts known as viral marketing or stickiness.

Additionally, webmasters may boost popularity to their website by distributing their branded flash games to other webmasters for free. The reason is that visitors to all these other websites that would never have seen the distributing company's brand now have it right before their eyes. Webmasters are eager for free content that will increase the user's enjoyment of, and time on, their sites. Therefore, they gladly accept the free branded flash games of larger sites. It's a win-win situation. Miniclip.com brought tens of thousands of visitors to their website through this method. Here, a webmaster recounts their experience:

"One of the more successful viral marketing campaigns that i think has been overlooked in this thread is miniclip.com. Back in the early days of the website they made the smart decision to put up a selection of their flash games for download so that other webmasters could download the games and use them on their websites. The games were heavily miniclip.com branded with links back to miniclip all over the place. People then jumped on this and started making "online game websites" using games that were provided for free on miniclip (and other similar websites), the webmasters would then advertise their new websites and drive a lot of traffic to miniclip."

In order to imitate the success of a Miniclip, you need to systematically produce games and submit them to the big gaming hubs, directories, and websites:

It *will* bring you some traffic but don't expect to get thousand of visitors via this way (unless you really submit 10+ developed games per month to the big sites)

Another webmaster confirms this and re-iterates the success of minicip:

he is right ! you have to develop more and more games like miniclip.com
they are i think the best flash gamers over the internet ! and they lets you play online and download the trail version of the games !

The cost of paying a flash game developer to create a completely original flash game from scratch ranges from $200 to $900. Of course, you'll want to mention that they can sell and customize the games for other webmasters too; do so only if price is a consideration. There are sometimes bulk discounts, and it's far cheaper to have a developer brand a game they've already developed. Freelancers (independent contractors that get paid on a job-by-job basis) can be found through guru.com , elance.com , rent-a-coder.com and on flash developer forums like flashkit.com.

Interestingly enough, there are also pre-packaged flash quizzes and games that can be licensed and customized. This is the best option for an up-start with a small budget that wants to rapidly imbue his/her site with content. For instance, some businesses offers a yearly licensing model for branded flash games. The best bet is to work with a company that already has some momentum in the field. For example, Galaxy Graphics lets you choose, license, and personally brand flash games from their large portfolio.

Recently, Orbitz and Lifesavers developed flash games on their websites that are showing to be successful in converting to more sales and greater brand awareness.

Branded flash games are one valuable asset that your budding business should not neglect.



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A Brief Look At The History Of The Post

A Brief Look At The History Of The Post by Jimmy Cox

From earliest times the peoples of the world have sought means of communicating with each other. These efforts may be traced to the very mists of antiquity, and before any means of written thoughts had come into use we may be sure that runners carried spoken messages between tribes.

Inca runners carried quipus - a strange collection of cords tied to a stick with the cords knotted so that the runner bearing them could slip each through his fingers and, as in counting rosary beads, recite the messages the knots recalled to memory.

Everywhere that tribes had formed and the beginnings of civilization had started, the first need was for communication with other tribes, and systems of communication were set up according to the need and the ability of the rulers to maintain them.

No one may claim the origin of the postal system. In one form or another it existed in all places on the earth wherever there were people, in all of the civilizations that have preceded our own.

All of these primitive systems existed for the benefit of the rulers. They were maintained at public expense but the runners were permitted to carry only the messages of the tribal chiefs or of latter-day kings and emperors.

It remained for Augustus Caesar to establish what most closely resembles our modern postal system. His Cursus Publicus had routes throughout the Roman Empire and the carriers were permitted to carry messages of certain high government officials not necessarily connected with the Emperor's household.

It is from this system that we get our present name "post" office. Along the roads traveled by the Roman couriers posts were established to mark the distances each should travel. Often a hostelry would be established at the post and hence we derive the word "post" and later "office".

Later the merchants of the Hanse towns along the Baltic coast set up their Hanseatic League and employed a postal service for their own convenience and occasionally, as a favor perhaps, a message would be carried for someone not a member of the league.

Still later the Counts of Thurn and Taxis established a private postal system that covered much of Europe and made their services available to all who would pay their fees. This was the beginning of our modern postal system.

In addition to the system operated by the houses of Thurn and Taxis, which, incidentally, was dignified by royal grant, there were various other private postal systems that more or less flourished in parts of Europe. One of these was conducted by the universities of France which had found it expedient to have some means available for the students to write home to get money.

In London in 1680 - almost two hundred years before the introduction of a modern postal system - William Docwra set up a "Penny Post" for the collection and delivery of letters within the limits of London City, which is a model of efficiency even to this day.

Docwra established letter boxes at designated points throughout the city as well as various branch offices. Letters would be collected from the boxes every hour and would be stamped at the branch office the exact time of their collection. This post proved so popular and so lucrative that Docwra became involved with the Duke of York who claimed royal prerogative for the delivery of mail.

In due course Docwra's post was taken over as a government function. It continued in operation until 1800 when it became "The Two-Penny Post".



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