When you open your mailbox, it is almost the same as your letters just Apparent. Fast, long before the supply of mail, postal service workers were carefully arranged by hand letters and miles on horseback back. For more than 250 years, the US postal service has worked behind the scenes to build a faster delivery network, and the mission has quietly presented it to the technology.
“Most people treat postal service like a black box,” said Jim McCain, USPS spokesman Jim McCain. Stuffy. “You take your letter, you have put it in a mailbox, and then it appears somewhere in a couple of days.
One of the major progress was made in 1918 with the introduction of Air Mail. The USPS worked with the Army Signal Corps to use the First World War to start service, and the aircraft were as bare as they could. A quote of the 1968 issue Postal Life The early aircraft is called the “nerve combination of whistlel wires”, with “wooden ribs” on the wooden ribs, tall tall tall tall tall tall tall lamb long lamb Long tall tall tall tall tall tah lol tah lol tah lol tah lol tah lol tah lol tah lol tah lol tah lol tah lol tah lol tah lol tah l
JR -1B Mail aircraft were previously used by USPS (1918). Photo: National Archives and Records Administration
At that time, the pilots literally endangered the supply of mail to their lives – 34 of them died between 1918 and 1927. “There was no commercial aviation, no airport. There was no radio. There was no navigation.” The postal service had to prepare all these items for just the mail. “
Once the USPS proved that it could deliver mail via airplane, Congress allowed trade aviation companies to contract with the air mail service, and today for the major airlines we know, such as US Airlines and United Airlines. In addition to paying for the mail supply, the contractors found that they could earn even more money by taking passengers with their luggage. “This is the place where commercial aviation began,” says the Cocherporger.
Air mail routes slowly began to spread internationally, first to Canada and then to Cuba. But after a couple of decades, the USPS tested with the shape of a delivery novel: Mail by table. In 1959, the USPS and the US Navy filled a Regulus I missile with two mile containers, which had a total of 3,000 letters. The missile traveled 100 miles in about 23 minutes, with the help of parachutes successfully landed at a naval base in the Florida city of Florida. Despite its success, the idea never came down. This shows that the missiles can’t just get the mail. And overall, instead of the ridiculous demonstration was a stunt to demonstrate power during the Cold War.
Regulus I Misle picked up 3,000 pieces of mail (1959). Photo: Collection of Postal Service of the United States
Back to the ground, the USPS set its eyes on improving the speed of mail processing. Although he began experimenting with a mile cancellation machine in the 1920s, which marked the used post, it was not until the 1950s that he had deployed an electro -mechanical sorting machine. Instead of manually sorting the mail using the “Pigeon Hole” procedure, the machine can do this for them, in which the workers used to insert miles into different parts within the post office in terms of address.
“Postal service is the driver of technical change.”
The transmament multi -position letter sorting machine is 13 feet high and was divided into two levels. It brought the email to the lower levels to a group of five postal workers at the upper level. The clerks will then use the keyboard to enter information about their destination. Based on input information, the machine will then take the letters into different trays and put them in injuries that will bring them back to the bottom. But since the years after World War II, the volume of the mail increased – between 1943 and 1962, each year reached 33 billion pieces of miles to 66.5 billion – a way to maintain the USPS.
For years, the USPS relied on clerks to memorize dozens of delivery schemes that they would use to set up letters, and prepare them for a career to divide them throughout the city. “It changed dramatically in 1963, (with it), perhaps the biggest innovation in which the postal service has done the biggest innovation ever, called the Zip Code.” “For the first time, mailing lists can be digitized in the computer and set up new ways.”
Zip Code – Short for Zone Improvement Plan – uses its first digits to indicate which area of the United States heads a parcel, the second and third indicates the nearby large city, and to identify the last two specific delivery area. After the introduction of the zipcode, the USPS’s innovation has increased, many of his innovations are in its foundation.
The “Mr. Zip” character helped the USPS promote the Zip Code (1968). Photo: United States Postal Service
This includes the adoption of USPS optical character (OCR), a widely used technology that transforms written or printed words into a textable text. In 1965, the USPS began sending large quantities of mail through OCR machines, allowing the “digital eye” to identify the address and automatically set the letters. If the machine cannot handle a person’s handwriting, the USPS will send a picture to the remote encoding center (REC) for human review.
On one occasion, the USPS had 55 RECs, but now only one Salt Lake City, Utah, is now. “Since our computer systems have improved to identify handwriting, we have reached the point where it has significantly reduced the number of letters that have to go into remote coding,” says McCain. Today, USPS OCR technology can read hand -written mail on about 9898 % accuracy, while the machine printed addresses can reach 99.5 % of its accuracy.
This machine is thankful for progress in learning, which the USPS has been using in the background for more than 20 years. He first started using a handwriting tool in 1999. The USPS is currently in the middle of the 10 -year -old modernization project, which includes investment in technology, such as AI. However, the project has been criticized for increasing the cost of stamps and disrupting services in some areas.
“Postal service is the driver of technical change,” McCain says. “In the last 250 years, popularizing or inventing postal service is difficult to increase.”
