We don't send many postcards today, but all the way up until the tail end of the '90s people still sent postcards whenever they went on road trips or traveled overseas. It was a way to say "Hey! Look where I've been." But even though postcards morphed into that, that's not how they began.

In the Edwardian era, postcards were used as a way of quick and easy communication. Whether you were just saying hello to someone or inviting them over for tea, you did it with a post card. Not only are they less formal than a letter, but they were less costly as well. There were six mail deliveries a day in towns like London (there were no phones), so it was possible for friends to trade messages back and forth with cute postcards that featured everything from cats in bonnets, to sexy ladies, and human oddities playing poker.

Six billion postcards were sent between 1902 and 1910, which means that someone had to design them, models had to pose, and someone else had to do the printing. For a short period of time the post card industry was a lucrative business.

The design of Edwardian postcards is top notch, and with so many different images and variations it's hard not to look at them all, but the aesthetic of these postcards is actually based on government ordinances of the day. In 1898, the United States Congress passed an act that allowed private companies to produce postcards as long as they made it clear that messages weren't allowed on the address side of the cards. Simple enough.

By 1901, postcard companies were printing pictures on the address portion of the card, making it unnecessary to feature a nasty message about not writing on both sides. There was no longer a reason to dissuade senders from using extra space because people wanted to preserve their cool looking postcards. By 1913, U.S. postcards entered the "Divided Back" period of design, meaning that there could be messages on the left half of the address side. Finally, people were free to write a little more.

At the height of postcard sales in the 1910s, there was a huge market for postcards with real people on them: sexy ladies, historical impersonators, and human oddities. Some of these models posed for hundreds of postcards while others posed for just a few. Cannon Colossus falls in between the former and the latter. He definitely posed for more photos than the other two men in this postcard, but he's not in hundreds like some of the models that you'll see if you go down the rabbit hole of the Edwardian postcard game.

The postcards featuring Cannon that are out there mostly focus on his weight, with one postcard featuring Cannon listing his weight as 634 pounds. Neither of the other two fellows - Cornelius and his short friend - show up online, so if they appear on any other postcards throughout the era then they haven't been scanned.

The reason that we don't know much of the back story behind this postcard is because it might have been a one time thing. Prior to the proliferation of postcards, cabinet cards made use of photographs that were applied to thick pieces of cardboard. These pieces of ephemera didn't need to have a professional model, it could literally feature anyone. And by anyone we mean a postcard model who gained a small amount of fame through his weight. Maybe they snapped this for fun, or maybe they were testing out a new photo to see if it would sell as a postcard.

Throughout the 1880s there were a series of cabinet cards sold that you can still find today at photography shows around the country. It's likely that this postcard was just a one-off  creation that happened to capture the imagination of the internet. After all, it's got three incredibly interesting looking guys all together, and how often do you see that kind of thing? More importantly, how often did you see that kind of thing in the 1880s?