Mail Processing Machines Post Office department costs increased each year, but the department mainly used outdated methods that were costly and inefficient. little had changed in the way the post office processed mail: almost everything was done by hand. however, the increasing volume of mail handled by the post office department each year made changes to mail processing necessary for its survival.
machines in the post office to improve the efficiency of the post office, machines were introduced. the first was a canceling machine, which replaced the need for employees to cancel mail by hand piece by piece. sorting machines sorted the mail by size so that the correct pieces were sent to the correct processing machines. Bordering and stacking machines were built to help other machines by stacking mail for faster processing. stamps could be detected and canceled by canceling machines.(1) Conveyor systems, such as “mail-flo,” helped move mail around post offices. basket dumpers allowed workers to unload large volumes of mail with less effort. parcel sorting machines and letter sorting machines gave a mechanical hand to workers sorting mail.
After these advances in mechanization came those in automation. Postal automation technology was led by the use of optical character recognition in which machines could read and sort mail without direct operator intervention. “Automatic” post offices, such as the turnkey project and the project gateway, were built to make the most of machines while minimizing the human element.
On the client side, new and more efficient vending machines were developed to speed up customers’ time in post offices or increase the hours during which people could use post offices. express mail was developed to send facsimiles instantly across the country (although it did not progress beyond the experimental stage). one report noted that “about the only postal facility that can defy this far-reaching change, letter carriers say, is the old-fashioned, trusty postal pouch. Federal engineers report that they cannot improve its folding and efficient features.”(2)
cancelling machine the first machine used in post offices was the canceling machine. The first patented canceling machine was created in 1875 by Thomas and Martin Leavitt. It was followed by improved machines until the 1879s. The first canceling machine was crank-operated and hand-fed and could only cancel items of the same size and shape. The Leavitt machine pioneered basic features shared by cancellation machines. the feed rollers separated and fed a piece of ‘front mail’ into the machine, one at a time and separate. the mail piece progressed to a rotating cancellation die bucket and a ring die. after the postmark and cancellation impressions were made on the mailpiece, it went into a stacker. pieces of mail accumulated in the stacker until the machine operator removes them.
various inventors worked to expand the scope of use of canceling machines, in recognition of the large percentage of postal mail. The basic model of this machine was created by inventors in the early 20th century, but was not tested until the 1920s. It was the only type of canceling machine used in post offices until after World War II. (3) the letters were separated by hand and had to all be placed in the same direction, with letters of different sizes separated, in preparation for the canceling machine. the letters were then “fed through an old-style manual canceling machine, which canceled the stamps and cancelled the letters.” even be helpful. however, when the sorting machine was invented, the process to get to the cancellation of the stamp became much more efficient and faster, requiring much less work to sort or separate a larger quantity of mail.
sorting machine the sorting machine was designed to separate pieces of mail depending on their size. Previously, each piece of mail would have to be sorted by hand into stacks of different sizes. with the sorting machine, the mail could be mechanically sorted. the discarding machine was able to save space, create more hygienic working conditions and increase overall productivity.(5)
Working as a sieve, in which the smaller items fall to the lower conveyors, the sorting machine could sort flat (large and flat envelopes), rolled papers, and ordinary mail parcels.(6) Letter Mail could move to other machinery, just like the other pieces of mail.
However, a study of discarding machines found that they were initially not very economical. Although they saved some money on manual slaughter, the speed of mechanical slaughter was about the same as manual slaughter. therefore, there was no initial saving.(7) The study called for changes to be made to the sorting machines to make them more efficient and, if this could not be done, then manually sort mail. the machines required skilled operators and so it might be easier to go back to manual removal. (8) The post office department invested more resources in the development of removal machines and saw improvements.
In 1960 a scrapping machine was designed that had “a series of inclined belts and rotating horizontal cylinders to remove oversized pieces.”(9) This design could remove approximately 60,000 pieces of mail each hour. an additional machine was made that would separate postal mail from other small mailed items such as hotel keys. this helps prevent subsequent machines from being damaged by such small mail items.(10)
singer-stacker after the mail was sorted, it had to be stacked in a similar direction to be placed in the canceling machine. in most offices, this work still had to be done by hand. however, some post office employees in nashville, tennessee came up with an idea for a machine that would be able to perform this task mechanically, the edger-stacker machine.
These edger and stacker machines were able to eliminate the manual stacking required before going through the canceling machines that came next in the mechanized process. (11) the letters would be stacked next to the cancellers for a postal employee to feed them into the next machine.(12)
the post office department was proud of this machine because it had been created by postal employees. overall, the edger-bunker was very successful. the “homemade” device “showed an annual return on investment ranging from about 70% in wichita, kansas, to 566% in flint, michigan.”(13)
canceller-facer the machine that came after the discard machine or the stacker-scrambler was the canceller-facer. this machine had the ability to automatically face letters before canceling them, meaning that letter mail could be fed into the machine in any direction and all mail coming out of the machine would be “facing” in the same direction when the letter mail came out of the machine. face canceller. therefore, the cards would not have to be faced by hand before being cancelled.
stacked cards could enter the machine and be canceled at rates up to 500 per minute. this machine increased efficiency by allowing six people working on it to cancel approximately 27,000 letters each hour. previously charters were canceled at a rate of about 16,000 per hour with crews of ten men. facer-cancellers thus helped decrease the number of employees working on cancellations while increasing the overall rate.(14)
these machines were first developed in contractor laboratories in 1958.(15) early cancellers would use light sensors to detect where the stamp is so they could flip mail if necessary to face the stamp to cancel correctly . the optical sensors were able to locate the position of the stamps by detecting any type of color contrast that would be present between the color of the envelope and the color of the stamps. however, this method had a major drawback, in that “insufficient contrast or printing on the envelope [could] fool the detection device.(16)
However, front-end cancellers were considered a vast improvement over older canceling machines and were a critical part of the post office’s modernization and mechanization program. however, there were still some problems with the machines. due to the optical detection device used to locate the stamps and the possible inability to do so due to lack of contrast, the machine had a high reject rate of twelve to fourteen percent. the production rate was considered to be lower than it should be, but was increasing over time. During the first few years of service, there was irregular mail flow from the machines, but this problem was soon resolved.(17)
The next development in the evolution of the face canceling machine was to change the detection device from being able to distinguish color contrasts to being able to detect stamps that were labeled with luminescent substances. The first stamp to be released that was completely “tagged” with a phosphorescent code was a 5-cent stamp commemorating the 100th anniversary of free delivery in the city and featured an image of a Norman Rockwell sketch of a mail carrier. the experiments had initially been done with an 8-cent labeled airmail stamp. The tagged stamp, when struck by ultraviolet light produced by the NCR Mark II face canceling machine, will glow green, which the machine will be able to detect. Although this machine could not process postal mail much faster than its predecessor, which processed 30,000 letters per hour, the rejection rate was much lower with the new machine.(18) This phosphorescent ink used to label stamps It was invisible to humans. eye.(19)
the stamp tagging program greatly improved the rate of letters that could be processed by face cancellers. the error rate with previous mark ii face cancellers that used the optical contrast technique to detect the seals was approximately 16.4% for cards that passed the machine without being canceled and 3.4% for the face canceller. stacking error, resulting in a total of nearly 20% of letters not being canceled correctly.(20) New face cancellers, with ultraviolet detection capabilities, processed mail with greater than 98% efficiency and the department goal was to exceed 99%.(21)
face cancellers were a vital part of the post office mechanization program because of the manual handling that could be eliminated by using such machines. although letters going through the machines would have to be manually addressed and canceled, this was still a vast improvement over all mail that was processed manually. the cost of the machines was significant, with a starting price of $18,000 and maintenance of about $7,000 a year.(22) however, they did speed up mail processing and make the operation more efficient.
mail-flo the post office department, in its desire to mechanize as much mail processing as possible, developed a system of conveyor belts that could be placed in larger post offices to eliminate both manual handling and transport of mail as possible. the idea was that such a system would reduce worker strain and the number of employees needed, while speeding up mail processing within the post office facility.
the conveyor system was renamed the mail-flo letter processing system, or mail-flo for short. The first Mail-Flo system was installed at the Detroit Post Office and used conveyors that would operate automatically to move mail within the Post Office. the goal was that such a means of moving mail, along with other systems such as overhead conveyors, would ultimately eliminate “inside baskets, boxes, or trucks” at larger post offices, with the ideal that “mail never would arrive”. to rest.”(23) The Detroit Post Office began operating the Mail-Flo system on December 4, 1956.
in 1958, the detroit post office increased its use of the mail-flo system to cover both incoming and outgoing mail. this helped clear the floor of many pieces of “portable equipment previously required in the manual movement of mail between workstations.”(24) The idea of such automated conveyor mechanization was not new; private companies had been using them for years. installation by the post office department was a big step toward removing as much of the human element as possible from the movement of mail and allowing career postal employees to do less manual lifting and carrying work.(25)
in late 1958 and early 1959 the main washington, d.c. the post office building(26) was remodeled to become the most mechanized post office in the united states and, as the post department touts it, the “most mechanized post office in the world”.(27) to have several machines, the washington, direct current. the post office had more than six miles of electric conveyor belts installed. the post office department also planned to install the mail-flo system in eight major post offices in total. the total length of the mail-flo system across all facilities combined would be approximately 262,000 feet, which equates to approximately 50 miles of conveyor belts.(28)
The plan to double the number of post offices that had Mail-Flo systems running in them began in 1959. The system was applauded by the department for being able to “[move] mail trays between sorting areas without trouble and efficiently, without disorder or confusion.”(29)
While mail-flo systems were initially found to be a success, a 1960 study by the Capsule Mechanization and Mail Processing Study Team found that no more mail-flo systems should be placed in post offices and plans to install them. they were canceled. the team found that the systems would have to be re-evaluated because before-and-after cost studies of the systems showed that they cost more than previously thought. therefore, the mail-flo system would need to be made more efficient before being installed in other post offices undergoing mechanization retrofits.(30)
A reassessment cost study of mail-flo systems conducted in 1965 by the department’s finance office concluded that instead of making post offices more efficient, mail-flo actually increased the costs of some of the mail processing operations. (31) Although the mail-flo system was not very economical, the era of post office conveyor belts had begun and electronic conveyor belts were continually being placed in major post office facilities.
basket tipper Another piece of equipment that was designed to help reduce the strain of manual labor on post office workers was the “basket tipper.” Basket dumpers were used to dump large baskets of mail onto sorting tables and conveyor systems such as the Mail-Flo. it was estimated that the machine would “eliminate approximately 95 percent of the manual labor normally required to empty a basket piece by piece.” to packages during mail processing. .(33)
parcel sorting machine due to its larger size, most packages had to be handled by hand during mail processing. the package sorting machine helped reduce the manual work required to process the packages. Early parcel sorting machines were controlled by operators who sorted packages by keying in their destinations into the machine.(34) Postal officials believed that parcel sorting machines could be invaluable in the mechanization of post offices and tested different types of packages. concepts for these machines to determine the most efficient model that could be produced.(35)
the main difference tested was the method the operators used to help the machines sort the packages. the initial machine was made by operating a keyboard, but one possible advancement of the machine was to change to one that could be operated by listening to spoken commands from operators. one of the reasons for this was the extreme variety in package sizes compared to postal mail sizes. “Packages would move on conveyor belts past employees who would utter the essential address into a microphone. the impulses thus generated would pass through electronic “memories” that would activate gates along the conveyor to unload the packages into the appropriate containers.”(36)
the first package sorting machine was placed in the baltimore post office for testing as one of the first machines tested by the post office department.(37) although the machine could save some space if they had to be used manual methods continued with the increased mail load, the machines were also quite large.(38) the washington, d.c. post office, contained a parcel sorting machine that used approximately a mile of conveyor belts and had a maximum height of over fifteen feet. the total weight of the machine was 125 tons.(39) the machine could sort around 15,000 packages every hour, cutting package processing time in half compared to previously used manual methods. (40)
While the machine’s potential ability to sort packages is much faster than manual methods, the machine was not always used as efficiently as possible. a cost analysis report on the webb postal parcel sorting machine, which was used in washington, d.c. post office, found that the machine was only being used at 41.8% of its potential capacity during the period studied. the reporting group concluded that the machines should be used more to further reduce labor costs.(41)
In August 1958 a separate machine was designed to sort items of unusual size, such as small packages and rolled newspapers. however, in May 1960 it was concluded that such a machine, which was separate from the main parcel sorter, was not economical because manual sorting of such a wide variety of sized mail would be less expensive. however, the report also recommended that a “flat” sorter for pieces of mail, such as large, flat envelopes and magazines, might be practical. In 1961, an experimental machine was designed for floor classification tests.(42)
in 1961 there were 21 parcel sorters installed in post offices or under contract to install.(43) in 1965 there were 72 parcel sorters installed or under contract.(44) greater efficiency was achieved and further testing was done with speech recognition. in 1962, to “further improve the reliability of potentially mechanical tray routing systems, package and sack sorting systems, and letter sorters, experiments have been conducted with routing and sorting signal recording devices whose operating principle it is similar to a tape recorder. by placing strips of magnetic material at the bottom of each mailbox, it was found that such signals could be reliably recorded and read.”(45) the department hoped that, with the implementation of postal codes(46), operators could to indicate the zip code of packages at a rate of 60 packages per minute with an expected error rate of only 2 percent.(47)
letter sorting machine Because much of mail processing is sorting, the Post Office Department wanted to develop letter sorting machines that would process mail mechanically or automatically. Various types of sorting machines were designed, from those in which an operator would key in a code that would send the letter to a destination mailbox, to machines that automatically read addresses and sort them into mailboxes. Although the pod began studying the idea of a letter sorting machine in 1922, no real work could be done on such a machine until postal budgets (and the willingness to modernize) increased after World War II.(48) at the time it was a critically needed piece of machinery.
In 1956 it was stated in the pod’s annual report that the mechanical sorting machines would be running experimentally next year. the machines would be capable of doing between 300 and 500 sorters (a split used to sort mail – state, city, zip code, house number, etc.).(49) In 1958 two letter sorting machines were being tested, the “bell” and “transorma” machine.(50) The bell sorting machine could sort more than 300,000 letters a day to 300 destinations when fully managed with six operators.(51)
in 1959, the burroughs corporation first introduced the first letter sorting machine made in the united states. at the time it was the largest letter sorting machine in the world.(52) In 1962, the Post Office Department was developing a portable sorting machine that could be operated by one person. this machine could be used in smaller post offices.(53) however, the larger machines would provide the greatest benefits. in a study on letter sorting and processing, it was found that “there appears to be fairly substantial evidence that one or more 20-operator sorting machines could be used in each of the 75 to 125 largest post offices.”(54)
There were essentially two different types of mechanized sorting machines. the first was a key sorting machine. an operator would read an address and sort the letter by pressing a key pattern memorized for the address. the second was the codesort machine. on these machines, operators would not have to memorize a pattern, but would type in codes based on addresses.(55)
In 1968, the multiposition letter sorter was installed in post offices, which was a “semi-automatic, electromechanical machine that distributes letters in separations from 160 to 279 at speeds of up to 43,200 letters per hour.”(56) Once there were 137 letter sorting machines in operation in 37 post offices.(57) In one year, the number of sorting machines increased to 205 in 79 post offices and more were ordered.(58) Letter sorting machines occupied a large number of space in post offices. a large letter sorting machine was 78 feet long and weighed 15 tons. the difference between letter sorting machines and manual mail sorting was huge.
Although the letter sorting machine was ultimately more efficient, there were studies early in the development of sorting machines that showed that manual sorting was still more cost effective than machines.(59) however, the Post Office Department continued to investigate and development in the machines and finally became a fundamental part of the department’s mechanization and modernization program.
Optical Character Recognition The Post Office Department had high hopes for Optical Character Recognition, which the department hoped would eliminate most of the human element in sorting mail. Instead of postal workers reading addresses and sorting mail pieces accordingly, machines could automatically read addresses and sort mail without the need for an operator.
Optical Character Recognition [OCR] research and development began for the Post Office Department in the 1950s. The Farrington Manufacturing Company began developing the Farrington Automatic Address Reader in 1954. This machine would eventually ” recognize through its character detection apparatus, typewritten, printed or printed addresses, single or double spaced, staggered or flush, almost anywhere on the front of the envelope” and then sort the mail pieces into different slots.(60)
There were two main ways that machines could automatically recognize characters. One way was optical, in the sense that a machine would use photoelectric cells to detect and read printed matter. another way was to use magnetic ink scanning to scan ink containing iron oxides.(61) while over-marking and lack of contrast could be problems for optical recognition, it was more practical for everyone than magnetic ink scanning.
Initial problems with optical character recognition machines were mainly based on the fact that people’s handwriting styles vary greatly and machines initially couldn’t learn how to recognize many samples. however, by analyzing the length of the strokes and the location of the strokes, some writing could be read.(62)
The potential benefits of optical character recognition were enormous. In a contract with the Farrington Manufacturing Company, the Post Office Department was trying to create a machine that could read and sort at least 10,000 letters per hour, which was three times what could be done with employees working on semi-automatic machines. they were testing.(63) Initially only typewritten addresses could be read, but research began to move towards reading handwritten addresses. the optical character recognition system was one of the most important technologies in development for the post office department.
In 1965, more work was done with optical scanners, which by then could read postal codes. a machine was built that scanned letters before entering the ocr machines and classified them according to whether they were legible or not.(64) the department’s reading machine was the “first to be used by any postal service in the world.(65) By this time, the machines were more than fifteen times faster than manual sorting of mail.(66) The first machine used for live mail began on November 30, 1965 at the Detroit Post Office and could Sort letters that had postal codes on them at rates of 36,000 per hour.(67)
The department saw ocr machines as the future of post office sorting and processing. the director of research and development in 1968, dr. Edward Reilley predicted that by 1978 mail processing would be done almost entirely automatically.(68) The benefits of using OCR instead of manual sorting were that money and time were saved in mail processing. it was “estimated that more than 50 percent of the total work involved in mail processing within a post office can be attributed to sorting operations where visual recognition of letter addresses is necessary.(69) with ocr this would almost cut the work required for mail processing in half.
turnkey and gateway projects (“automatic” post offices) the goal behind turnkey and gateway was to try to create a fully automated post office. Located in a new purpose-built facility in Providence, Rhode Island, the turnkey project was so named because it was supposed to be built and then be able to function with the turn of a key. the gateway project, located at the post office in oakland, california, got its name from the idea that it would be the “gateway” for most of the mail flow to and from much of the area of the Pacific coast.(70)
Post office costs were high, but the Post Office defended them as good investments because Post Offices would be experimental laboratories from which future profits would come to the Department.(71) The Post Office had the hope that these post offices would work well and process mail more efficiently. When asked what he thought the “post office of tomorrow” would look like, Postmaster General Summerfield predicted it would resemble the Providence and Oakland post offices.(72)
other post offices around the country were also being modernized at the time. In 1960 it was announced that a major post office would be built in Detroit that would be fully mechanized. the new detroit post office would use the machinery that was currently under development and would also have room for future machines.(73) the detroit post office was “the first large post office to be highly mechanized and fully equipped with state-made mail United”. equipment and processing machines.”(74)
The providencia post office turnkey project was also designed to be able to equip the necessary machinery to process the mail. the building was one story and had only two supporting columns to maximize floor space for machinery. the post office department stated that the building would contain “perhaps the largest number of special purpose machines ever created for a single business.”(75) most post offices that were being modernized were being equipped with machines in their current buildings , not made for big machines. what made the turnkey project promising is that the machines were designed before construction, which would allow the maximum potential benefits of the mechanized post office to be reaped.(76)
Hopes for success of the turnkey project were high. one reporter wrote that “were it not for the probability promised by the turnkey project, all of us (mail carriers and letter receivers), in 1985 or earlier, would be swimming in a sea of mail.”(77)
however, the turnkey and gateway projects were not the success they were initially thought (or hoped) to be. A memorandum was sent in April 1961 to suspend the terms turnkey and gateway.(78) Several problems related to turnkey were revealed in a report to Congress. For one, “the post office department [was] not processing mail at the Providence postal facility for the geographic area for which the facility was designed.”(79) In addition, major mail processing machines they were not being used to their full potential. and some were not being used at all. the report concluded that “the department failed to conduct appropriate studies and, as a result, prior to the government’s commitment to spend more than $40 million over the life of the lease, had not determined whether the proposed mail handling equipment and system would be suitable for processing mail efficiently, if savings can be expected from mechanizing mail handling operations, and if the contractor is technically capable of designing and constructing a mail handling facility and mechanized mail handling system .”(80)
Another problem with turnkey was that employees were not given enough training to operate the machine. Employee morale was also negatively affected by local newspapers criticizing the operation.(81) The Providence Post Office was never fully automated as previously announced. a house subcommittee determined that the turnkey project “failed miserably” and that the costs of the post office were “grossly excessive.”(82)
some defended the turnkey project as more successful than what was said about it. the post office saved money by having to hire only one-tenth as many temporary workers as needed the previous year and required less overtime from workers.(83) Some employees were satisfied with their jobs there, glad they were doing less manual work than required before the machines were brought to Providencia.(84) In addition, some technicians in the department stated that the turnkey actually worked better than expected and that it was necessary to remember that the Providencia post office it was an experiment and no one was sure exactly what would happen to it.(85)
vending machines vending machines were introduced for public use long before the mechanization program began. for customer convenience, machines that could sell stamps were placed in the public areas of post offices. while the lobby was open, even if the postal counters were closed, customers could purchase stamps. machines were popular fixtures in post offices in the early and mid-20th century.
In 1955, new vending machines were developed that not only sold stamps, but could also sell stamp books, envelopes, and postcards.(86) in washington, d.c. post office in 1956 a new vending machine was installed, produced by the pitney-bowes postal meter company called the mailomat; An earlier version was first installed in Boston in 1948.(87) The Mailomat would seal and deposit mail for further processing. “[it] automatically printed a postmarked subway stamp in all denominations, from one to 33 cents, directly onto letters of various sizes.” the post office work area for the fastest possible service. such automatic movement of mail was considered to be in keeping with the department’s goal of “streamlining” the postal service.(89) Faster service was also obtained through the use of mailomat because the metered mail that would be purchased through the machine do not have to be canceled because they already had a postmark.(90)
Public response to the vending machines continued to be positive, and more vending machines were placed in post offices across the country. Because these machines were so popular, the Post Office Department came up with the idea for fully automated post offices that would be self-service. Because they did not require employees, these post offices could be open 24 hours a day.(91)
express mail one program that began under postmaster general arthur summerfield but never fully took off was “express mail.” some thought that the post office might eventually get rid of regular postal mail altogether and send everything by typewriter or by facsimile. (92) continent almost instantly.”(93)
However, when the express mail system was developed, ideas about the practicality of such a device were uncertain. one post office that was allowed to test it reported that “…it seems to us that express mail would be to our advantage only in occasional or emergency cases.” . a letter was sent to president eisenhower via express mail to test the system in 1960. at that time it was hoped that express mail would, within a few years, “make possible overnight delivery of first-class mail from any office post office in the United States to another.”(95)
Using express mail would not take away the privacy that comes with sending letters, which was one of the main concerns people had about using such a system. the post office department assured people that no one would be able to see the contents of the letter except the person who sent it and the recipient. messages were to be “inserted into a machine at a post office, converted into electrical impulses, transmitted to another post office by microwave, and automatically switched to a suburban station or other post office in a few seconds. these impulses can be reconverted at the receiving end into a facsimile of the original document and delivered to the recipient.”(96)
When Postmaster General Day took over in early 1961, he decided to end the express mail project. he reported that the program was expensive, having cost the department approximately four and a half million dollars, and that there was competition with private companies in developing the program. told the House Post Office appropriations subcommittee that it stopped the program because “there are great doubts as to whether facsimile mail is mail at all…this is not an area the post office department should pursue; the service is provided by private firms… [and] the need for a special service at the end of the delivery makes the facsimile service a very expensive per-item operation.”(97)
In 1969, in a study on electronic mail handling by the General Dynamics Electronics Division, it was stated that a possible future of mail delivery could be electronically through televisions. reported that “Cable television networks are quite common today, and would form the basis for the transmission of mail directly to the home in electronic form. the nebulous area, of course, lies in the popular acceptance of the system and in the sanctity problem. the market for non-email delivery will likely remain, even after all the new concepts are put into practice.”(98) However, the Post Office steered clear of e-mail delivery and left this to itself. hands of private companies.