BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Natl Postal Museum -- Exhibit (MIA Galleries 4): Systems at Work

DC -- Natl Postal Museum -- Exhibit (MIA Galleries 4): Systems at Work:

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[1] SIPMSY_120106_001.JPG	[2] SIPMSY_120106_002.JPG	[3] SIPMSY_120106_005.JPG	[4] SIPMSY_120106_009.JPG	[5] SIPMSY_120106_013.JPG
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[46] SIPMSY_120106_275.JPG	[47] SIPMSY_120106_279.JPG	[48] SIPMSY_120106_289.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. SIPMSY_120106_002.JPG: Systems at Work: The United States Postal Service is a vast, intricate network more than 200 years old and it connects us all. Its mission is to provide service to a growing population with hundreds of millions of delivery locations. Achieving this mission is an ever-evolving challenge of engineering and imagination. For more than two centuries, the postal system has adopted and invented a remarkable array of new systems and technologies to get the mail into your hands.
2. SIPMSY_120106_005.JPG: Spreading the News: 1808: The official postal system of the new United States began in 1792. Over the next decade and a half, it grew faster than it has ever since. Mailing letters was expensive at first, to help subsidize the cost of mailing newspapers -- the crucial long-distance information system of the times. In 1800, postal officials began using selected postal offices as distribution centers, where mail for large areas was processed and sent on. This "hub-and-spoke" system is in use again today.
3. SIPMSY_120106_009.JPG: Frontier Mail: 1859: The postal system helped the nation grow. Newspapers and letters linked settlers moving west and the families and communities they left behind. Mail eased the isolation of the frontier. Immigration and westward expansion pushed the postal service to grow and experiment. More Americans meant more mail, and the mission of the Post Office Department was to reach as many as possible -- by horse, wagon, stagecoach, ship, and train.
4. SIPMSY_120106_013.JPG: Postage Stamps: Until 1847, local postmasters calculated the cost of postage, which varied depending on the number of sheets in the letter and its destination. The sender could pay all, part, of none of the postage. The addressee had to make up the difference. In 1845, Congress lowered postal rates and made them more uniform. Two years later, Congress authorized the first postage stamp. Rates dropped again in 1851 -- down to 3 cents -- where they remained for more than 30 years.
5. SIPMSY_120106_020.JPG: Who was on the first postage stamps? The first two U.S. postage stamps were a 5-cent stamp showing Benjamin Franklin and a 10-cent stamp with the image of George Washington. In 1855, Post Office made the use of prepaid postage stamps mandatory for mailing letters. How did lower postage rates affect ordinary citizens? Lower rates and prepaid postage stamps brought the cost of send first-class mail within reach of many more Americans. This encouraged more reading and writing, letters to distant friends and relatives, business transactions, and communication of many kinds across the growing United States.
6. SIPMSY_120106_036.JPG: A Tiny Revolution: In the 1840s and 1850s, lower postage rates and the advent of prepaid postage stamps transformed the mail system in the United States. A 3-cent stamp like this could take a letter from coast to coast.
7. SIPMSY_120106_050.JPG: Growing a Business by Mail: 1885: The mail-order business blossomed in the late 1800s. With the postal service as a distributor, companies began to serve more and more customers across the country. The seed business thrived on mail orders. Seeds were crucial to the economy, and they were given a special, lower postage rate. Seed catalogs and mail-order shipments enabled farmers to try new varieties of plants and follow the latest scientific advice.
8. SIPMSY_120106_054.JPG: Machines Move the Mail: 1917: In some big cities, city post offices were designed as factories behind an elegant facade. Inside, buckets and conveyor belts moved the mail through the system. Canceling machines marked the postage stamps. Automobiles joined ships, trains, streetcars, and pneumatic tubes as machines that moved the mail. As the machinery of the postal system changed, it still connected families and businesses around the world.
9. SIPMSY_120106_057.JPG: From the battlefield in France to Linwood, Maryland. And American soldier writes a postcard home, reassuring his family that he's surviving in France, and takes it to the American Expeditionary Force post office. A U.S. Post Office worker drives the military mail to the port in France before being placed on board a ship bound for New York City where it arrives a week later. At the New York City post office, the postcard is dropped into a pouch for Maryland. A wagon carries the pouch to Pennsylvania Station and it's placed on the Railway Post Office car in the southbound New York and Washington train. The postcard is sorted en route into a pouch for the Baltimore and Cumberland RPO car, and transferred in Baltimore. In the Baltimore and Cumberland RPO, the postcard is sorted again into a pouch for Linwood. As the train passes Linwood, the pouch is thrown from the car, and a mail messenger picks it up and carries it to the Linwood post office. Sorted by hand in the post office, the soldier's postcard is taken on a Rural Free Delivery route and dropped in an RFD box where his family picks it up.
10. SIPMSY_120106_062.JPG: American Postal Canceling Machine: American Postal Machines Company stamp canceling machine. The company operated from the early 1890s to 1940s, producing canceling machines for the Post Office Department. This machine, designed by engineer Thomas Stoddard of Boston, was in use in several post offices in the first two decades of the 20th century.
11. SIPMSY_120106_070.JPG: Pitney Bowes Mailing Machine: This Model A mailing machine, built by the Pitney Bowes Company, was first put into commercial use in late 1920. The machine was built to house the company's Model M postage meter. This electrically-operated machine helped revolutionize letter mail processing.
12. SIPMSY_120106_080.JPG: Helping Unclog the Mail: After World War II, mail volume grew every year -- doubling between 1946 and 1966. Dependent on federal subsidies, the Post Office couldn't buy enough machines and hire enough employees to keep up. In October 1966, a flood of holiday advertisements and election mailings choked the system. The Chicago Post Office, the world's largest postal facility at the time, was overwhelmed by mail. It stopped delivering mail for three weeks. Mail overflowed surrounding post offices. Soon, the mail back up was felt across the country. Change was essential.
13. SIPMSY_120106_085.JPG: ZIP Codes: By the early 1960s, the swelling volume of mail was taxing the Post Office Department to its limits. Zoning Improvement Plan -- ZIP -- Codes were one response to this growing mountain of mail. Using numbers to stand for regions, cities, post offices, or even city neighborhoods made its easier [to] sort the mail -- by machine or by hand. Today ZIP Codes are used to help shape everything from voting districts to marketing campaigns. What Do the Codes Represent? Think of each 5-digit ZIP Code as a group of addresses. They might be homes or businesses, schools or apartment houses. One 5-digit number might represent 10,000 delivery points -- spread out over many miles in a rural area of concentrated in a few city blocks. What Does Each Number Mean? The first digit represents a region of the country. The next two digits stand for a central post office facility in the region. The last two digits represent a post office or a postal zone. So, the ZIP Code 97403 means the west coast & Pacific, Eugene mail center, and the University of Oregon.
14. SIPMSY_120106_094.JPG: Behind the Scenes: 1968: Codes and machines revolutionized the Postal Office in the 1960s. The ever-growing volume of mail drove the Post Office to introduce ZIP Codes. Machines began taking on more and more of the work of moving the mail. Postal workers using these machines could sort 30,000 letters an hour. Since then, the pace and scale of automation in the postal system has exploded.
15. SIPMSY_120106_143.JPG: Handle with Care: 1936: By the mid-1930s, the US parcel post system was more than 20 years old. It had opened a new world to rural Americans. Products that rarely left cities only a few years earlier now appeared at their doorsteps. And farm produce traveled to urban markets by mail. Businesses depended on the efficiency, reliability, and security of the parcel post. A parcel that arrived late was sometimes no better than one damaged or lost.
16. SIPMSY_120106_146.JPG: The Chicken or the Egg? From Washington State to Alaska Territory Chickens can have a hard time wintering in Alaska. So, in the spring, an Alaskan farmer ordered eggs from Seattle in time for them to hatch into chicks after they reach Alaska. Packages travel at different rates based not only on size and weight, but on distance. In 1913, with the introduction of Parcel Post, the Post Office Department began dividing the nation into zones to help determine reasonable postage for parcels. When a post office clerk weighted the egg crate with a scale like this, he or she learned that it weight between one and two pounds. Parcel post to Alaska was 15 cents for the first pound and 11 cents for each additional pound. The crate's postage was 26 cents. The eggs travel from an eastern Washington farm to Seattle by rail, and on the way they are sorted into a sack for the Seattle and Seward boat route. At the Seattle post office, the pouches await the next ship headed north and are carried aboard on the day the ship sails. Four days later, the ship docks in Seward, Alaska. The pouch holding the eggs is taken to the post office, and its contents are sorted for an Alaska Star Route that might carry them across the territory on a variety of vehicles -- another ship, a small plane, or dogsled. Learn more about routes like this in the museum's atrium exhibit.
17. SIPMSY_120106_152.JPG: Barcodes: Once numbers -- ZIP Codes -- began to represent addresses, barcodes representing numbers was the next step. Barcodes are easily read by machines all along the route of a letter or parcel. From the start, they helped mail reach its destination faster and more accurately. Today, they help generate information for senders and recipients as mail moves across the country. How do bars represent ZIP Codes? The USPS began using barcodes in 1982. The bars represented the 5 digits of the ZIP Code and helped automate mail sorting -- the machines read the stripes instead of the numbers. What's in a barcode besides the ZIP Code? Over the years, the USPS has used 5, 6, 9 and now 31-digit barcodes to steadily increase the speed and accuracy of mail delivery. The extra bars include "carrier sort" field coding that sorts the mail to the order it's delivered in.
18. SIPMSY_120106_190.JPG: Bulk Mail Centers -- Streamlining the mail flow: Lots of businesses send out millions of pieces of mail -- from magazines to sweepstakes entries -- sometimes in a single day. The USPS has worked out a system with businesses like this so they take on some of the work of preparing and sorting the mail, and the USPS gives them a discount on the postage. Take a magazine, for example. Judy Franklin's aunt and uncle buy her a subscription to the new Nintendo Power Magazine for her 11th birthday. They mail in the subscription request, and the magazine's distributor is notified to add the Franklin residence in Norman, OK, to the list of recipients. The company that mails Nintendo Power prints postage and an address label [on] each copy, and sorts the magazines to the first three digits of their ZIP Codes before stacking them on a pallet. These pallets are then shipped to the nearest Bulk Mail Center. At the Bulk Mail Center, the pallet is spot-checked to make sure that the mailer has been accurate about the number of magazines shipped, weight, etc. The magazines are then sorted there, and shipped out to different postal facilities across the country. Judy's magazine goes to the Norman, OK Processing and Distribution Center, where the magazine is sorted into the rest of the mail stream and sorted down to the appropriate local post office. Twenty-one of the new Bulk Mail Centers were built in the 1980s. The Postal Service hoped to keep up with the rising ride of commercial mass mailings by crisscrossing the nation with a network of specialized centers, and by implementing pricing policies that encouraged mailers to carry some of the burden of sorting and transporting the mail.
19. SIPMSY_120106_193.JPG: Recognizing and Reorganizing the Mail: 1988: As the sheer volume of mail continued to grow, it began to overwhelm the mechanical innovations of the previous 60 years. In the 1980s, the USPS made strides to keep up with this river of mail in two main ways; by using automated machines that took on more of the work of sorting the mail and by reorganizing the channels through which some mail flowed with new Bulk Mail Centers.
20. SIPMSY_120106_198.JPG: Camera Mechanism, Lockheed-Martin Wide Field of View [WFOV] Camera: Developed by Lockheed Martin and the USPS and deployed in 2002, the WFOV camera can read many forms of barcodes, machine-printed writing, and even handwriting. By taking four simultaneous images of each mail piece, the WFOV camera achieved remarkable levels of accuracy. OCR: The Unblinking Mechanical Eye: Since research began in the 1960s, Optical Character Recognition -- the ability of machines to read printed words -- was seen as an essential first step in truly automating mail processing. With such technology, a significant percentage of the US mail could be sorted and processed without a single human eye reading the address until it was ready for delivery. The unblinking mechanical eye of the Optical Character Reader (OCR) camera oversaw huge swaths of mail processing.
21. SIPMSY_120106_211.JPG: Reading Handwriting: By 1997, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software could recognize handwritten block letters and translate them into code, then double-check the address against a database of known addresses and names. Of course, some handwriting is so bad that it challenges even the best machines. When this happens, an image of the letter is sent to a Remote Encoding Center located hundreds or even thousands of miles away, where workers read and decipher the scanned images. Then they return that information to automated machinery that applies the appropriate routing barcode and moves the mail piece back into the mail stream.
22. SIPMSY_120106_220.JPG: Automation Increases: 1997: The Postal System continued to increase automation -- more and ore mail passed through fewer and fewer hands along the path from the post office to people's home. But no matter how much automation occurs, people remain part of the process. As machines do more, people still must operate, supervise, maintain, and design the machines. And as the machines become more complex, they present ever more difficult problems for engineers to try to overcome.
23. SIPMSY_120106_224.JPG: For decades, mail carriers had to sort their mail into its delivery sequence before they went out on their routes. This process often took several hours. The Carrier Sequence Bar Code Sorter (CSBCS) was one of the first widely implemented machines that automated the sorting of mail down to the delivery sequence. Mail could go directly from the CSBCS to the carrier -- in order and ready to be delivered.
24. SIPMSY_120106_237.JPG: (1) Feeder Mechanism: Mail is first loaded into the feeder mechanism. This piece of the machine takes the mail and feeds it, one piece at a time, into the CSBCS. The black paddle pushes mail forward while a series of belts pull one piece of mail at a time into the machine.
25. SIPMSY_120106_241.JPG: (2) CSBCS "Head": The CSBCS "head" is actually the main control interface for the device. Operators use the buttons and switches on this unit to turn the machines on and off and control certain basic settings. In addition, a series of lights notifies operators of the machine's status and errors in processing.
26. SIPMSY_120106_244.JPG: (3) WABCR Camera: The Wide-Angle Bar Code Reader (WABCR) camera takes a piece of each piece of mail. The image is sent to a computer where the letter's destination is determined using the PostNet barcode printed on the front of the envelope. This data is then sent back to the CSBCS for sortation.
27. SIPMSY_120106_252.JPG: (5) Trays: Finally, the letters are sorted into various trays at the end of the machine, and the letters from each tray are re-loaded into the feeder for a second pass. After two passes, the letters are in delivery sequence and ready to be distributed to carriers.
28. SIPMSY_120106_257.JPG: (4) Delay Line: The delay line is a relatively simple series of belts that serves a very important function. Mail goes through the CSBCS at a shockingly high speed -- about 19,000 letters per hour. The mail is literally moving so fast that there is not enough time between the WABCR camera and the sortation process for the computer to figure out where the letter is going. The delay line is an extra stretch of line that delays the letters long enough so the machine can figure out how to sort them.
29. SIPMSY_120106_263.JPG: The Mail Gets Smarter: 2005: As automation advanced, more and more mail was handled primarily by machines rather than humans. But these machines were not, at first, particularly clever. They could do only one, rather simple, repetitive task. As USPS software grew more sophisticated, however, machines began to multitask -- they were able to deal with different types of mail pieces and various contingencies. This introduced new levels of efficiency and nimbleness to a Postal Service that was larger than ever.
30. SIPMSY_120106_266.JPG: System Mail: Today: Today, the postal system is a vast intricate, automated system -- even faster and more efficient -- and a partner with other systems in American life. It still relies on a combination of people and machines -- including technological systems like the Internet. And it offers services now -- like letter tracking -- that were unimaginable a few decades ago.
31. SIPMSY_120106_275.JPG: Intelligent Mail: Once ZIP Codes were translated into automation-readable barcodes, the USPS and mailing companies began working to pack more and more information into those codes. The codes evolved into the USPS's Intelligent Mail Barcode system. The original 7-digit ZIP code is now 31-digits of information tucked into 65 bars in each code. The 31 digits include ZIP Code information [and] other data that can reveal how the mail was presorted, whether it was first-class mail or a periodical, the business sending each piece, and automatic address forwarding information. The barcode also permits tracking of individual pieces of mail. When you return a pre-addressed business reply by mail, businesses can forecast when it will arrive. All this saves companies money, makes their business more predictable, speeds mail delivery time, and makes the postal system even more efficient -- and efficiency is important, considering that half a billion pieces of mail flow through the system each day.
32. SIPMSY_120106_279.JPG: Top 10 Things This Barcode Knows: Each piece of mail has a unique intelligent barcode that can be read by automated machinery and workers using Intelligent Mail Devices (IMDs). (1) Shows the point of origin. (2) Shows the destination. (3) Shows the mailer's organization or business. (4) Matches the item's address to a confirmed address database. (5) Automatically forwards the mail to a new address if the receiver has moved. (6) Alerts the receiver that the item is in the mail. (7) Alerts the sender that the item has been delivered. (8) Alerts the receiver or sender when the item will be delivered. (9) Finds the piece of mail while it is still in the system. (10) Identifies the machines that process that piece of mail.
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Description of Subject Matter: Systems at Work
December 14, 2011 – Permanent
Level 1: Mail in America Galleries
You drop a letter in a mailbox and then what happens? You receive mail at home or the office! But how does it get there? Find out in this exhibition that re-creates the paths of letters, magazines, parcels, and other mail as they travelled from sender to recipient over the last 200 years.
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