You've Got Mail: Sorting and the USPS

Mail mail. You might not think about it much these days, but the mail just doesn't stop and it never has. Every type of mail, from postcards and letters to large envelopes and packages of all sizes, travels across the United States every day, although it is not usually delivered on Sundays. Coping with the ever-increasing volume of physical mail necessitated the invention and evolution of automatic mail sorting machines that are used by both postal services and businesses.

Although mail sorting machines have grown and matured over the years, the human element of the task remains intact. As long as people are typing addresses, handwriting them, and/or printing them out in handwritten fonts by the hundreds, there will have to be humans around to verify at least a few of them that are < really hard to read.

There are about a dozen different types of mail sorting machines in 2023. In this series, we're going to look at most of them, as well as many other aspects of the United States Postal Service and its story.< /p> Don't fool postal workers

Post boxen dovecote at Stanford University. Image via Wikimedia Commons

As you might have guessed, mail was once sorted entirely by hand. This was accomplished using locker message boxes - a locker system, like you might see in a university office. On a larger scale, the task was divided into a hierarchy of sorting stations across the country.

At a smaller station, a sorter may fill the lockers based on delivery routes. Larger sorting stations had many more potential routes, so mail could be sorted by the state it was heading to or, if it was already there, by city. Mail would travel through this system of sorting stations to the local post office, where sorters then map out the delivery route.

This system has its limitations - the sorter's memory, for example, as well as the length of its arms. It may come as a surprise, but that's how it was done for much of the 20th century, until the creation of the first automated sorting machine, Transorma.

automatic for the people

While some of the first mechanical mail sorting equipment was made and tested in the 1920s, the first true sorting machine was the Transorma, so named for "TRANsport and SORting" plus the surnames of the inventors, Marchland and Andriessen. It was built by a Dutch heavy industrial company called Werkspoor.