Chain Letters

Chain letters are far older than the '90s kids who dreaded them. Charity and luck letters circulated by mail as far back as an 1888 fundraising appeal from a women's missionary group, and 'good luck' chains — forward this or misfortune follows — were common through the early 1900s. The most infamous variety, the money chain, exploded out of Denver in 1935: the 'Send-a-Dime' or 'Prosperity Club' letter told you to mail a dime to the name at the top, cross it off, add your own name to the bottom, and send copies on to five more people.

The 1935 craze was a genuine disaster of arithmetic. Because each letter demanded more letters, the chain multiplied until it buried the Denver post office under as many as 100,000 letters a day before collapsing within weeks — exactly as an exponential pyramid must. That math is also why money chains are illegal: the U.S. Postal Service treats any chain letter asking for money or items of value as a form of lottery and mail fraud. The 'good luck' and prayer-chain versions that asked for nothing but your effort were legal, if useless.

For decades the postal chain letter kept circulating — passed to a new generation of kids who copied them out by hand — until the mid-to-late 1990s, when email made forwarding one nearly free. The chain letter didn't die so much as move: it slipped out of the mailbox and into the inbox, and the dread of breaking the chain came right along with it.