When you open your mailbox, it is almost the same as your letter is just Feel likeLong before the days of speedy, mail delivery overnight, postal service workers carefully sorted through the letters by hand and mails on the horse’s back. For more than 250 years, the US Postal Service has worked behind the curtain to create a fast delivery network, and this mission quietly pushed it at the forefront of technology.
“Most people treat postal service like a black box,” says USPS spokesman Jim McCain Ruckus“You take your letter, you put it in a mailbox, and then it appears somewhere in a few days. The truth is that that piece of mail is touched by many people and machines and is taken over that period – this is a modern miracle.”
A major success was in 1918 Introduction to airmailUSPS worked with Army Signal Corps Use the remaining world war I aircraft To launch the service, and the aircraft were as naked as they could get. a fraction A 1968 issue of Postal life The initial aircraft is called “a nervous collection of whistling wires”, with “the linen is stretched on the wooden ribs, all are connected to a whey, water-cooled engine.”
At that time, the pilots put their lives at risk to literally match – 34 of them died between 1918 and 1927. “There was no commercial aviation, no airport. There was no radio. There was no navigation,” is called USPS historian Stephen Kochharpurger. “The postal service had to develop all the things that were only to distribute the mail.”
Once the USPS established that it could firmly distribute the mail by the aircraft, the Congress allows commercial aviation companies to contract airmail service, which today we know that we know the basis for major airlines, Like American Airlines And United AirlinesAlong with paying for mail, the contractors found that they could earn more money by taking passengers with their goods. “This was where commercial aviation flew,” called Kochharpurger.
The airmail route gradually started expanding internationally, first to Canada and then Cuba. But a few decades later, the USPS experimented with a novel form of delivery: Mail-Misile. In 1959, USPS and US Navy loaded a Regulas I missile With two mail containers There were 3,000 letters in total. The missile covered a distance of 100 miles in about 23 minutes, successfully landed at a naval base in Florida’s MOW with the help of a parachute. Despite its success, the idea never left. This suggests that missiles can’t just match so much. And overall, this ridiculous performance was more of a stunt to show force during the Cold War, According to Smithsonian,
Back to the ground, the USPS set its places on improving the speed of mail processing. Although it began to experiment with a mail canceling machine in the 1920s, which put a mark on the post used, it was not until the 1950s that it deployed an electromachanical sorting machine. To sort manually manually Using the “pigeon” methodIn which the labor will put pieces of mail in various coaches inside the post office on the basis of address, the machine can do so for them.
“Postal service is a driver of technical change.”
Transolma multi-pose letter sorting machine 13 feet high measured and divided into two levels. This led the mail to a group of five post workers at the upper level on a conveyor belt from its lower level. The clerk will then use a keyboard to enter information about his destination. Based on the information input, the machine will then transport the letters into separate trays and drop them into the chuts that bring them back to the lower level. But in the years after World War II, the amount of mail increased – going 33 billion pieces of mail Between 1943 and 1962, up to 66.5 billion per year – a way was required to maintain USPS.
Over the years, the USPS had depended on clerks to recall dozens of delivery schemes, which they would use to sort the letters, prepare them for the carrier to distribute them throughout the city. “It dramatically changed in 1963, (with) perhaps the biggest innovation that the postal service has ever rolled out, called the Zip Code,” Kochharpargar. “For the first time, mailing lists can be digitized in computers and sorted in new ways.”
Zip code – small for zone improvement plan – uses its first digit to indicate which area of the US has a parcel, to indicate the second and third to indicate the major city nearby, and the last two to indicate a specific distribution area. The speed of innovation in the USPS increased after the introduction of the zip code, with the creation of several innovations subsequently.
This involves adopting the optical character recognition (OCR) of the USPS, which is a widely used technique that converts written or printed words into machine-readable text. In 1965, the USPS began sending large versions of the mail through OCR machines, allowing the “digital eye” address to identify and automatically serial letters. If the machine cannot do a person’s handwriting, the USPS will send an image to a remote encoding center (REC) for human reviews.
At one point, there were many as USPS 55 RECBut now only one remains in Salt Lake City, Utah. “As our computer system has improved in recognizing handwriting, we have reached the point where it significantly reduces the number of letters that have to go into remote coding,” called Maccaine. Today, USPS OCR technology Can read handwritten mail About 98 percent of accuracy, while machine-crushed addresses bring its accuracy to 99.5 percent.
Thanks to advances in machine learning, which also uses USPS, using in the background for more than 20 years; It started using one first Handwriting recognition equipment in 1999. The USPS is currently in the middle of a 10 -year modernization scheme, which Technology involves investmentLike AI. However, the plan has faced criticism Raise the price of tickets And Disruption of service in some areas.
“Postal Service is a driver of technical change,” McCain says. “It is difficult to reduce the amount of technology that is involved in either popular or innovation in the last 250 years.”
