The first time it happened to me, I was in elementary school. A good friend handed me a folded piece of paper and I quickly opened it, eager to read whatever gossip was written inside. “If you don’t copy and send this to ten people ...” it began. A chain letter, one of the most annoying things passed along to people by their supposed friends, had struck again—and being the superstitious kid I was, I grudgingly complied.
Of course, this was back in the olden days, when writing messages via large electronic boxes was for only the very rich or technologically advanced. Now that young and old people alike use email daily, chain letters can be spread more easily, which is great news for their originators and terrible news for the rest of us. Whenever I get such a forward, I tend to shake my head and wonder why people still propagate such nonsense. But the better question is, how did chain letters ever begin?
Superstitious from the Start
Pinpointing the origins of chain letters is no easy task, but luckily for us, a man named Daniel W. VanArsdale made a study of it, collecting more than six hundred paper chain letters over the course of his research. According to him, the first real one—that is, a message specifically asking people to spread the word by hand-writing copies of the original for some sort of self-benefit—was written and disseminated in 1888. However, instructions for cures and prayer requests written with the intent of passing them along were common long before that.
The types of chain letters we’re most familiar with request money or promise some kind of reward for the readers who continue the mailing cycle. But the first chain letters were religious, claiming to contain the word of God or asking for charitable donations and/or prayers for those in need. They preyed on people’s fears about what would happen to their souls if they didn’t do as the letters instructed. From the start, therefore, chain letters’ success depended on the public’s superstitions. As literacy and the printed word evolved in the early 1900s, so did the letters—they reached international audiences and moved beyond religious purposes. That was also when they started including duplication and deadline specifications.
It wasn’t until 1935 that the first money-generating chain letter was spread. This type of letter requests a sum of money, usually with the understanding that its recipients will somehow make even more money by donating. The first such dispatch was known as the “Send a Dime” letter; it generated hundreds of thousands of versions throughout the country. Other forms of the chain letter became more frequent as well, such as the purely rewarding ones (“Forward this to five people and you’ll win a trip to the Bahamas!”) and the ones promising good luck or bad luck (“Forward this to five people and you’ll meet the love of your life tonight!”). By the 1970s, handwritten copies of letters were rare; most people relied on the invention of copy machines to spread the word. And by the 1990s, letters were sent in email form.
Chain Letters Go Digital
Chain letters may have started out with altruistic purposes, but these days they’re more often fodder for scammers. It’s illegal in the U.S. to falsely suggest that any kind of reward can be gained from sending money or some sort of valued good—technically, it’s a form of gambling. But this type of content is difficult to crack down on because it spreads so far and can change over time (though the latter prospect is less of a problem now that people aren’t hand-writing chain mail). However, virus spreaders now use electronic chain letters as a way to send trojans out into the online world and infect millions of computers.
People aren’t sending chain letters just through email forwards, either. If you watch a YouTube video, chances are someone’s included a short, chain letter-type message in the comments. Social-networking Web sites like MySpace and Facebook also have their own kinds of chain letters, usually in the form of bulletin posts or wall messages. The most viral ones encourage people to write about themselves; a popular example of this trend is the “Twenty-Five Things You Don’t Know About Me” Facebook message that circulated in summer 2009.
