A Faster Sort of Mail

U.S. mail hurtles along its appointed rounds in swift trucks, trains and planes. As soon as it hits a post office, though, the mail creeps through the hands of human sorters who faced 72 billion pieces of mail last year. To speed up sorting, the Post Office Department is pinning its hopes on a new electronic gadget: an optical scanner that reads machine-printed addresses and sorts mail 15 times faster than the most efficient postal clerk. Introduction of the device, says Postmaster General Larry O'Brien, "is as much an historical event as the issuance of the first U.S. stamp in 1847 or the first city delivery of mail in 1863."

In Detroit's main post office, a prototype of the scanner has already processed more than 500,000 pieces of mail. As many as 36,000 letters an hour can be fed into a conveyor system that carries them past a cathode-ray tube. The tube's scanning beam locates the last line of each address, converts it to electrical impulses that are recorded on an electronic version of a scratch pad. They are then read by a computer that recognizes city, state and ZIP code characters by comparing them with 6,000 combinations of standard characters.

Shunted to the proper slot of a mechanical sorter, letters wind up in one of 279 bins representing major U.S. postal zones.

The Post Office Department plans to install three more of the $260,000 optical scanners in Detroit and two more in Buffalo, with others to follow in major mail centers across the country. Though each optical scanner can do the work of twelve mail clerks, Postmaster General O'Brien has promised automation-conscious Detroit that "no employee will lose his job as a result of the machines." With U.S. mail volume rising at the rate of 2.3 billion pieces a year, he says, the Post Office needs even more men to move it. Moreover, no one has yet designed an optical scanner that can decipher the innumerable variations in human handwriting, which is still used to address 20% of all U.S. mail.

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