There was not much good news to be found in the recent virus invasion of the nationwide computer-driven telecommunications network known as Arpanet, but there was this: The mail did go through.
Not electronic ”mail,” some of which was delayed for several days, but the U.S. mail: the letters, bills, invoices, checks, magazines, newspapers, advertising circulars, catalogues and packages that the United States Postal Service moves from place to place every day, 154 billion pieces of mail a year, as much mail as is moved throughout the rest of the world.
If history repeats itself and the mail volume continues to grow at a rate of 3 percent to 4 percent a year, the Postal Service will deliver about 257.5 billion pieces of mail in the year 2001, almost two-thirds again as many as it delivers now.
To meet the demands of the 21st Century, the Postal Service is looking to Defense Department and NASA technology that can be adapted to postal operations.
”Experiments have been conducted using ballistic missiles as a means of mail transport,” one reads on page 1081, Vol. 25 of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1985). Recite that passage to Gary P. Herring, director of the Office of Advanced Technology at the U.S. Postal Service, and he will favor you with a hearty laugh.
Trained in physics and mathematics, having cut his professional teeth as a computer programmer and systems designer for NASA, having designed and supervised design of Postal Service systems for 18 years, Herring, 52, does not envision the Postal Service lobbing a payload of Christmas cards, packages, checks and ”You may already have won $100,000” envelopes across the Atlantic to London.
The Chicago Public Library is full of tracts and treatises dating from as recently as seven years ago suggesting that the Postal Service, if not doomed by the threat of ”mail” sent by computer and facsimile systems, by the diversion of postal revenue to electronic banking and privately owned express services, is at least vulnerable to the fierce competition.
”Can the Postal Service be saved?” the authors ask, and they speak of
”crises,” even of ”threats to democracy” as the Postal Service falters, hobbled by the duty to deliver unprofitable mail that the private services won`t touch.
”If you look at what comes in your mailbox,” said George Yanos, associate director of the Computer Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago, ”you realize there isn`t much mail in there anymore.”
Yanos was speaking of general correspondence, which has lost ground to the telephone, to illiteracy and to electronic mail. He turned to his computer terminal, struck a key and reported that 8,594 missives were, at that moment, sitting in the university`s computer queues, waiting to be read.
Despite all prophecies of doom and despite real competition from rival carrier services, the Postal Service goes right on delivering 3 percent more pieces of mail each year than the last.
”Every year for several years beginning in the late 1970s,” Herring said, ”Arthur D. Little (the consultants) and everyone else was predicting that six years later, incursions of electronic mail would have a big impact on revenue and volume. Then they stopped doing it because the projections were bearing no resemblance to reality. The post office is losing its total share of the market, but the total volume continues to increase.”
As the Postal Service sees it, the key to modernization lies in automation. But don`t look for layoffs. As more post offices are built to accommodate urban sprawl, there will be plenty of work for the Postal Service`s labor force, currently 633,387 full-time employees and about 167,000 part-time and temporary postal employees.
In 1987 the cost of city mail delivery-the Postal Service`s term for the time mail carriers spend on the streets-accounted for 13.8 percent, the largest share, of the Postal Service`s $35 billion budget.
”There isn`t much we can do about that,” Herring said, ”because the laws of nature and physics say that you can`t get the mail to the door better than having somebody take it there. Someday maybe a robot would be able to do it. But that`s nowhere in the near future.”
So the Postal Service concentrates its technological research on operations the public seldom sees: automation, optical character reading and bar-coding, all of which speed mail sorting. To understand how important sorting is, it`s necessary to know how a letter gets from one place to another, a complex chain of events with chances for error at every point.
A letter mailed from, say, a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., to an address in the 1500 block of Chicago`s Astor Street, is dropped in a corner mailbox, where it is collected by a mail-truck driver, who takes it to the local post office. The letter next passes to a collection station in the county seat, which in turn sends it to the Northern Virginia Management Sectional Center.
There, each letter first passes through a machine, capable of handling 3,000 letters an hour, that ”faces” it: turns the envelope so the stamp faces the canceling device, which then finds the stamp and cancels it. The device can distinguish between a stamp and, say, a picture of Ed McMahon, because the stamp is phosphorescent.
The canceled mail is then sorted by ZIP (Zoning Improvement Plan) code, loaded onto trucks, taken to one of Washington`s airports and loaded onto commercial airplanes.
After the Chicago-bound letter arrives at O`Hare International Airport, it is trucked to Chicago`s Main Post Office, the busiest in the world, handling about 8.22 million mail pieces a day. There it is sorted by carrier route and sent to Ft. Dearborn Station at 540 N. Dearborn St., which serves the ZIP codes 60610 and 60611.
When the Astor Street carrier arrives at the Ft. Dearborn Station, between 4:30 and 5 a.m., he finds all the mail he will deliver that day waiting to be hand-sorted for orderly delivery over his route. When there is more mail than he can carry in his bag, the excess is trucked to a storage box, where he can pick it up later. Finally the carrier drops our letter in the recipient`s mailbox, one of 96 million mailboxes nationwide.
Sorting mail would be simple if packages and envelopes came in two or three standard sizes, if all the ad-dresses were typed or printed in uniform sizes and shapes and attached to the same place on each piece of mail. It then could be sent through computer-driven sorters that would have nothing to do but read the addresses and instruct mechanical devices to send this letter down Chute A, that one down Chute B, another to Chute C and so on.
But that is a pipe dream, Herring says. ”Even if we gave everyone a small device for printing ZIP codes on whatever they mail, they would lose them, and some would print the wrong numbers just to be mean. Americans can be very stubborn.”
Indeed many Americans resent ZIP codes; they`re appalled by the introduction of the 9-digit ZIP codes, called ”ZIP code + 4,” which direct mail to one side of one city block, in some cases to a single building or even to one or two floors of such a building.
The problem, then, is that mail comes in all sizes and shapes, that handwriting, whether printed or script, can vary as widely in size, shape and color as insects in a tropical rain forest. Even in Chicago`s Main Post Office, only about half the mail can be deciphered electronically and bar-coded for sorting by automation.
”Optical character readers (OCRs) now in service are capable of reading some handwritten ZIP codes,” Herring said. ”Unfortunately we have to tune them so they don`t read most handwriting. Because if the OCRs will read, say, 25 percent of the handwriting and make a mistake in about 25 percent of that, it would mean that one-eighth of the handwritten mail would be misdelivered.
”But OCRs may be available for reading handwritten ZIP codes highly reliably even by 1995,” Herring said. ”But then the difficulty is in finding the ZIP code before it can be read.”
Locating the ZIP code on a piece of mail now depends on the human eye. A more or less typical mail-sorting device, Herring said, will have 12 operators sitting at a conveyor that feeds them stacks of mail one letter at a time. A mechanical arm with a suction device picks the top letter from the stack, then drops it front of an operator, who reads the address and punches computer keys to imprint a bar code on the face of the letter.
In package sorting, locating stamps, postal meter marks and addresses is complicated because packages come in all sizes, shapes and weights. But the Postal Service has developed scanning devices that look on all sides of a package, or on both sides of a flat piece, to find the information needed to cancel the stamp or meter mark and print the bar code that enables automated sorting down the line. Mechanical devices to face such mail have been found wanting.
”Mechanical problems are too hard to solve,” Herring said. ”If you can turn them into electrical problems, they`re much easier.”
They`re also more versatile. ”By 2001, we will have intelligent systems that can learn while they`re working. Nothing we`re working on today has that capability. We have equipment we can teach but nothing that can teach itself.”
One example is optical character readers that read just about anything. Said Herring: ”If, say, a church circle mails out 400 letters that one person has addressed by hand, by the year 2001 I would expect an OCR to react to that handwriting as it comes before the device and read each address better than the one before. It will say to itself, `I now recognize this as the way this person makes the letter ”O.” `
”There are two ways to do this. One way is to match patterns. Let`s say there are four ways to make a `4` and four ways to make `9.` You have a pattern for each. The machine sees a `4` and recognizes it is Pattern No. 2 for a `4.` Another way to do it is statistically, where you develop an equation based on a large sample. You put 10,000 `4s` through a set of equations and find the best statistical match for a `4,` and that becomes the equation that goes into the computer.”
”We`re also working on OCR technology that will be able to read addresses from context, even handwritten addresses. Finding the ZIP code and a city and state in a handwritten address, they won`t look at the individual characters, just the shapes. `Troy, Alabama` looks nothing like `Troy, Michigan.` The shapes of `A` and the `M` look nothing alike.”
In time OCRs will be able to decipher an entire address by context, Herring said. ”The last line of just about any address will be a ZIP code or else a city, state and ZIP code. People just do it that way. If it`s the latter, there will be a comma. People put commas between cities and states. So if you see a line with a comma and a word before and after it and then a number, that`s a city-state-ZIP. If the line above it starts with numbers, that`s a street address, not an apartment number-box number. That will be an application in 2001.”
None of this technology conjures the kind of futurist images we have come to expect from illustrators looking into cloudy crystal balls: domes over cities, interurban monorail systems, computers that do everything from detecting burglars to sprinkling the lawn to buying groceries from the supermarket. All that had once been predicted for 1984, a year that came and went with scarcely a hint of such progress.
What it does suggest is that more people will get their mail on time and at reasonable cost in spite of themselves. No longer will the Postal Service lose, misdirect or otherwise confuse the delivery of 154 million pieces of mail a year. But even that record is not so bad as it looks.
”When you put it against 154 billion mail pieces,” Herring pointed out, ”it`s an error of only a 10th of 1 percent. Most people would think that`s a reasonable error for anyone to make.” –
