The technology presented to us by the American Post Office

When you open your mailbox, it looks like your messages only He appears. A long time before the rapid delivery days, overnight, postal service workers were accurately sorted through the messages by hand and mail transferred on horseback. For more than 250 years, the American Postal Service has worked behind the scenes to build a faster delivery network, and this mission quietly pushed it to the forefront of technology.

“Most people are treating postal service like a black box,” says Jim McCain, a USPS spokesman. freedom. “You take your message, put it in a mailbox, and then appear somewhere in two days. The truth is that this mail is touched by many people and machines and transferred in that time period – it is a modern miracle.”

One of her big penetrations occurred in 1918 with Introduction from Air Post. Usps worked with an army signal corpus The first world war planes used residue To launch the service, the aircraft were naked as it could be obtained. Excerpt 1968 number of Postal life The early plane is called a “nervous set of yellow wires” with “linen on the wooden ribs, all connected to a water cooler.”

At that time, the pilots literally risked their lives by delivering the mail – 34 of whom died between 1918 and 1927. “There was no commercial flight, no airports. There was no radio. There was no transportation,” says USPS historian Stephen Kushirrsberger. “The postal service had to develop all these things only to deliver the mail.”

Once USPS has proven that the mail can be reliably delivered to the plane, Congress allowed her to contract the island mail service for commercial airlines, and the basis for the main airlines that we know today, Like US Airlines and United Airways. Besides getting money for delivery of mail, contractors found that they can earn more money by carrying passengers with their charge. “This was the place where the commercial aircraft took off,” says Kusheersbreger.

Air mail routes gradually began to expand internationally, first to Canada and then to Cuba. But after two decades, USPS tried a new form of delivery: mail via dandruff. In 1959, USPS and the American Navy uploaded a RGUULUS I missile With two mail containers That had 3000 letters in total. The missile traveled 100 miles in about 23 minutes, as he succeeded in landing at the naval base in Maypest, Florida, with the help of the umbrella. Despite its success, the idea was never launched. It turns out that missiles could not carry much mail. In general, this funny demonstration was more than a trick to show strength during the Cold War, According to Smithsonian.

Again on the floor, USPs put its attention to improving the speed of the mail treatment. Although it started trying to cancel the mail abolition in the twenties of the twentieth century, which has placed a mark on the used mail, it was not until the 1950s. Instead of manually sorting the mail Using the “pigeon” methodWhere workers insert parts of the mail into different cabins inside the post office depending on the address, the device can do this for them.

the Transorta multi -site sorting machine It is 13 feet and is divided into two levels. It carried a mail on a lower level conveyor belt to a group of five plugin workers on the upper floor. Then employees use a keyboard to enter information about their destination. Based on the information entered, the device will transfer messages to different trays and drop them on the pitfalls that brought it back to the basement. But with the increase in the size of the mail in the years after the Second World War – Go From 33 billion pieces of mail In the year to 66.5 billion between 1943 and 1962 – USPS needed a way to keep up with.

For years, USPS relied on a writer to save dozens of delivery plans they would use to sort messages, and prepare them for tankers for distribution throughout the city. “This has changed dramatically in 1963, (with) the innovation that the postal service has ever appeared, called the postal symbol,” says Kushirrsberger. “For the first time, mailing lists can be numbered and sorted in new ways.”

The postal code – short for the improvement plan of the region – is used its first number to refer to the US region headed by the expulsion, the second and third to refer to a major city near, and the last to refer to a specific delivery area. The frequency of innovation in USPS increased after the introduction of the postal code, with the construction of many subsequent innovations on the basis of it.

This includes the dependence of USPS to learn about visual letters (OCR), a technology that is widely used to convert written or printed words into an automatic reading text. In 1965, USPS began sending large quantities of mail via photographs of letters, allowing the “digital eye” to identify addresses and sort letters automatically. If the device is unable to make a person’s handwriting, USPS will send a picture to a remote coding center for human review.

At one point, Usps had up to up to 55 RecsBut now only one in the Solt Lake City, Utah. “Since our computer systems have become better to recognize the handwriting, we have reached the point in which I greatly reduced the number of messages that should go to a distance coding,” McCain says. Today, USPS technology Handwriting mail can be read At the accuracy of approximately 98 percent, while eating printed publications to 99.5 percent.

This is thanks to developments in machine learning, which USPS also uses in the background for more than 20 years; It started for the first time using a Handwriting In 1999, USPS is currently in the middle of the 10 -year update plan, which Includes investments in technologyLike artificial intelligence. However, the plan faced criticism for Raise the price of stamps and Causing In some areas.

“Postal service is a driver for technological change,” McCain says. “It is difficult to exaggerate the amount of technology in which the postal service has participated in either a circular or innovation over the past 250 years.”