When you break, open the mailbox, it’s almost like your letters just to appear. Long before the time of brisk postal deliveries, employees of the postal service meticulously sorted the letters manually and transported the post office on a horse. For over 250 years, the American postal service worked behind the scenes to build a faster supply network, and this mission quietly pushed it in honor of technology.
“Most people treat the postal service like a black box,” says USPS spokesman Jim McKean The Verge. “You take a letter, place it in a mailbox, and then appears somewhere in a few days. The truth is that this postal is affected by many people and machines and transported at this time – this is a modern miracle.”
One of his great breakthroughs took place in 1918 Introduction of air mail. USPS cooperated with the Army Signal Use the remains of World War I To start the service and the planes were as pigeon as they could. Fragment with 1968 edition Postal life Called the early aircraft “nervous set of whistles” with “linen stretched on wooden ribs, all attached to a screw, water -cooled engine.”
At that time, pilots literally risk their lives, providing post office – 34 of them died in 1918–1927. “There was no commercial aviation, the airport. There was no radio. There was no navigation,” says USPS historian Stephen Koverperger. “The postal service had to develop all these things to provide the post office.”
After determining the USPS that he can reliably deliver mail by plane, Congress allowed him to include an aviation service to commercial aviation companies, placing the foundations for the main airlines, which we know today, Like American Airlines AND United Airlines. In addition to payment for providing mail, contractors found that they can earn even more money by carrying passengers with a load. “This is the commercial aviation,” says Kockersperger.
Airlines gradually began to expand on the international arena, first to Canada, and then to Cuba. But a few decades later, USPS experimented with an pioneering form of delivery: postmark for mice. In 1959 with two postal containers He had a total of 3,000 letters. The missile traveled 100 miles in about 23 minutes, successfully landing in the Navy base in Mayport, Florida, with a parachute. Despite the success, the idea never started. It turns out that bullets simply can’t wear so many mail. In general, this quite absurd demonstration was more a feat to show strength during the Chilly War, According to Smithsonian.
After returning to Earth, he set aiming in improving the speed of mail. Although in the 1920s he began to experiment with a machine cancellation machine, which placed a used sign, only in the 1950s he implemented an electromechanical sorting machine. Instead of manual sorting of mail Using the “drawer” methodIn which employees put by post into different compartments at the post office, depending on the address, the machine can do it for them.
“Postal service is the driving force of technological changes.”
. Multi -position Sorting Machine for the letters Transorma He measured 13 feet of height and was divided into two levels. He wore a post on a conveyor from a lower level to a group of five postal workers at a higher level. Officials then used the keyboard to enter information about their destination. Based on the information, the introduced machine will transport letters to various trays and drops them to chutes that brought them back to a lower level. But with the escalate in the number of mail in the years after World War II – it goes from 33 billion mail Annually to 66.5 billion in 1943–1962 – USPS needed a way to keep up.
Over the years, USPS depends on officials to remember dozens of delivery programs they would utilize to sort letters, preparing them for distribution of carriers throughout the city. “This changed dramatically in 1963, [with] Probably the biggest innovation that the postal service has ever introduced, called the postal code, “says Kockersperger.” For the first time, mailing letters can be digitized in computers and sorted in new ways. “
Postal code – an abbreviation of the zone improvement plan – uses its first digit to indicate which US region is a parcel, second and third to signal a nearby enormous city, and the last two to indicate a specific area of delivery. The rate of innovation in USPS increased after the introduction of the postal code, and many subsequent innovations are based on its basis.
This includes the adoption of optical recognition of characters by USPS (OCR), widely used technology that transforms written or printed words into a text reading the machine. In 1965, USPS began to send enormous amounts of mail via OCR machines, enabling “digital eye” to recognize addresses and automatically sort letters. If the machine could not solve the handwriting of the person, the USP will send the image to the remote coding center (REC) to review man.
At some point, USPS had the same 55 RecBut now only one remains in Salt Lake City, Utah. “Because our computer systems were better in recognizing handwriting, we have arrived to such an extent that we have significantly reduced the number of letters that must go to remote coding,” says McKean. Today OCR USPS technology can read a handwritten mail With almost 98 % accuracy, while the addresses with machine print undermine its accuracy up to 99.5 percent.
This is thanks to machine learning progress, which USPS also have been using in the background for over 20 years; It started to utilize for the first time Handwriting tool In 1999, USPS is currently in the middle of the 10-year modernization plan, which It includes investments in technologysuch as AI. However, the plan was criticized Raising the price of stamps AND causing disruptions in some areas.
“Postal service is the driving force of technological changes,” says McKean. “It is difficult to overestimate the amount of technology that the postal service has been involved in popularizing or innovation in the last 250 years.”