ROBOT LETTER SORTER

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 266, 9 November 1935, Page 14

ROBOT LETTER SORTER

BRITISH EXPERIMENT.

DEALS WITH 24,000 HOURLY,

(Special.—By Air Mall.)

LONDON, October 19

Robots arc on the increase in Britain. The latest comes in the form of a letter sorter at Brighton, and by means of its aid it is possible for one sorter to consign a letter to nny one of 325 boxes in tho course of an afternoon's job. nithcrto he could use only 48 boxes and from these further sorting was necessary. The machine is 70ft long, 12ft wide and 7ft high and comprises two identical, but separate units, a total of 050 boxes.

When it is operating at a period of heavy pressure 10 sorters are at work together. Each man is seated, with a keyboard in front of him, similar to that of a typewriter, and his supplies of letters are sent to him by a rising conveyor belt from tables on the ground floor, where stamping machines have post-marked them at the rate of 000 a minute.

The keyboards cover a range of 325 numbers, and every town or area of importance has its own number. Thus Eastbourne may be No. 23, Liverpool 200, or Norfolk 300. The operator pick's each letter from the moving belt, notes tho address, drops it through an aperture and at the same time tnps tho code nyniber of the destination town on the keyboard.

The letter falls into a metal carrier which takes it to tho correct box. Each sorter can deal with at least 40 letters a minute, and the machine thus had a total output of 24,000 letters an hour. At night the same process is applied to the incoming mail for distribution. Then the boxes represent, not towns, but tho "walks" of individual postmen.

Postal packets ana large-sized letters cannot bo accommodated- by the machine and must continue to be dealt with by manual processes. Teams of sorters —27 sorting- clerks for the outgoing letters and 28 sorting postmen for the incoming letters —have been trained to operate the machine. This training involves accurate memorising of the code letters for each town or district represented by the 325 sorting boxes.