Electronic devices to replace post offices

Title

Language

English

Source

Panorama XIV (5) May 1962

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

Electronic devices Zo Kepiace Post Officers The flood of letters in Ger many threatens to deteriorate into, a flood catastrophe. Every day no less than thir ty million letters and parcels pass through the postal offices in the Federal Republic of Germany and West-Berlin. This is more than twice as much as only ten years ago, and the number of items car ried by the post is still rising rapidly. Personnel to sort these tremendous masses of mail is in very short supply, and robots will have to under take this work in future. Automation in the federal post office has progressed to a gratifying degree. Almost all long-distance telephone traffic is already being hand led by the self-dialling tele phone network. The Federal Republic, moreover, can boast of having the densest telex (private teletyping) network in all the world. An electro nic letter sorting machine will relieve the overworked postal workers of the major part of this terrific amount of work in the near future. In order order to prepare this conver sion gradually, the post office robot will soon send its greet ings to the eighteen million households in the Federal Republic of Germany, in the form of a booklet containing the new Postal Guide Num bers, as they have been called; numbers which are used as a code characterizing each of the 24,000 post offices in the Federal Republic of Germany. In Munich and Darmstadt two electronic sorting ma chines have been installed, which have already been working satisfactorily for some time, and which are the pride of Mr. Stuecklen, the Federal Minister of Postal Affairs and Telecommunica tion, who is energetically promoting rationalization and automation schemes in the fe deral German post offices. May 1962 81 The new sorting machine will at first deal within only the first working cycle: All mail items too large or too thick will be separated, and specially packed to be further processed by human effort. All this means that Mr. John Citizen will in future have to use standardized envelopes, and to refrain from putting any quantity into the enve lope just to utilize the full postage rate. The robot ma chine will be able to process letters only up to half an inch thick. The electronic brain of ihe machine can only read certain figures; therefore, the new Postal Guide Numbers have become necessary. After preliminary sorting, the letters, without being touched by a human hand, will pass through a machine sorting so that all letters will appear with their addresses up. In order to make this possbile, the letter stamps in the Federal Republic of Germany will in the future be of lumi nescent paper. The first of the stamps are already in print. Over a conveyor line the individual mail units will pass up to the desk of a post official who will attach an in visible magnetic sign to the envelope, corresponding to the postal guide number of the address. But he need not touch any letter by hand. The last sorting machine will then sort the letters by postal guide numbers. The machine has ben designed to be able to manage no less than 20,000 letters every hour. Every innovation will cost money, in particular so com plicated an apparatus as elec tronic machinery. As the ba lance sheet of the Federal Post Office last year did no longer show a net earning at the end, the Federal Minister of Postal Affairs has been compelled to announce an in crease in postage rates, which roused a storm of protests in the public. Minister Stuecklen replied that he would be ready to restrict the higher postage rates of {he post office to those items of mail which were not marked with the new Postal Guide Numbers or which did not correspond to the standardized dimen sions. Another eight to ten years will pass until the 45 majoi post offices in the Federal Republic of Germany requir ing approximately 250 electro nic sorting machines will be fully automated. In order to be economical in operation each one of these machines must sort at least 100,000 let ters a day. But perhaps, the Federal Post Office will be (Continued on page 92) 82 Panorama THE COLLEGE . . . (Continued from page 80) purnia: But above all, he must be an educational lead er. If he cannot, because of his other responsibilities, something’s got to give. The solution of “a Damon-and-Pythias relationship to some trusted provost, dean of fa culty, or assistant” is, accor ding to Dr. Stoke, “rare and fortuitous.” He insists that “the real solution of the prob lem must wait upon more fundamental institutional evo lution.” But can we afford to wait that long? Will Dr. Dodd’s study point to a quick er way out? The college pres ident cannot, like Pooh-bah, continue to function much longer as Lord High Every thing Else. There were no H-bombs in Titipu. INDIAN WORDS . . . (Continued from page 57) mangus) and the cheetah (from the Hindi chita). A vast army of English words has also been admitted into the Indian languages. Spoken Telegu, for instance, is estimated to contain no less than 3,000. This enrichment of vocabulary and literature has, therefore, been a two-way traffic. ELECTRONIC . . . (Continued from page 82) successful until then to make so much money in other fields of its activity that the citi zen will be able to mail his corrspondence, which will be electronically sorted, for a postage of still no more than twenty pfennigs. “They tell me Boobleigh has a childlike faith in his wife.” “Yes, it’s wonderful. Why, he even goes so far as to take her word for it when she says there is plenty of gas in their car” — Judge. ♦ * * Husband (to wife, over phone) : Good news, dear. I’m pretty well played out, tramping all over town, but I’ve found an apartment at last. Wife (ecstatically): Oh, Horace, you darling! Do hurry home and tell me all about it. “There’s no great hurry. We don’t move in until 1982. The present tenants have a two years’ lease.” — Life. 92 Pang

pages

81-82,92

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