Mail sorting goes electronic
The forthcoming sharp increases in postal charges raise an obvious question: how far can the UK鈥檚 General Post Office forestall further increases in mechanisation?
As the Postmaster General remarked in the House of Commons, no electronic machine yet invented will walk down the path and deliver letters. But a letter undergoes elaborate adventures before it arrives at the gate, and more than one-fifth of the cost of the postal service is now spent on sorting letters and packages.
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In April next year, 20 electronic sorting machines will be delivered to postal sorting offices as part of a field trial. These present each letter to a human sorter who then reads the address on the envelope and presses buttons to send it to the appropriate box. However, this still limits the sorter to 120 destinations because this is the maximum number of localities that a human sorter can remember.
However, a simple code written on each envelope might overcome this problem, allowing one set of sorters to subdivide envelopes by the first part of the code while another group subdivide them further by the second part 鈥� London already has a proto-system of this using the distinctions W1, EC1 and so on.
Even more promising is a scheme being studied by the Dollis Hill postal laboratories whereby each letter would be marked with a visual or magnetic code at the first post office so that some or all of the subsequent sorting processes could be performed with electronic detectors. Letters can already be sorted by size and presented to a franking machine in the correct right-way-up orientation 鈥� automatic sorting is merely a step further along this road.
One would hope that the Post Office will realise that by increasing automation it will clearly offer the likelihood of a cheaper service while, at the same time, improving it.
From The New 杏吧原创, 25 July 1957