INVENTION OF A LETTER STAMPING MACHINE.

Bruce Herald, Volume III, Issue 61, 8 June 1865, Page 8

INVENTION OF A LETTER STAMPING MACHINE.

About four months since we informed our readers that we had seen the working model of a machine invented by Mr F. E. Wright, Chief Postmaster of this province for stamping the dates on letters, oblite-' rating the postage stamps, &c. &c. Since then we have seen the machine in working order, and have not the slightest hesitation in pronouncing it a perfect success. The great difficulty to be overcome in a machine of this kind has been to adapt it so as to stamp letters of different thicknesses. This difficulty will at once strike most people, for were stampers arranged so as to fall with certain force in the ordinary manner on a very thin substance, they would necessarily crush anything thicker. This difficulty has, by a simple and ingenious contrivance, been overcome in the machine we are now speaking of, and the date stamps in it exercise no more perceptible pressure on a letter an inch in thickness than they do on an empty en«velope of tissue paper. Our readers who received letters from the Christchurch office by the last English mail .will not fail, upon inspecting their envelopes, to admire the beautifully clear impression of the date stamp. One of the chief advantages in bringing this machine into general use will be found in the preservation of those expensive articles, date stamps ; those in Mr Wright's machine have now stamped upwards of 150,000 letters, and the fine lines in the stamps appear as though they had but yesterday left the engraver. The effect of stamping this number of letters with the hand would have been to batter down all the thin lines, and destroy the clearness of the impression made by the stamps. In February the English mail was stamped by the machine in the presence of Mr Crawford, the Inspector of the Post-office. The mail consisted of 5524 letters, and was stamped by one person in one hour and forty-five minutes. Mr Crawford, we learn, expressed himself highly pleased with the manner in which the work was performed by the machine, and reported on it in the most favorable terms to the Postmaster-General. On the 25th March, the January mail from England, together with the mails arriving at the same time from other places, containing in all 7252 letters, were stamped by the machine, although the person working it was subjected to many interruptions, in one hour and forty minutes. On this occasion the Hon. H. J. Tancred and Mr Joseph Palmer were present to watch the working of the machine on behalf of the Post-office authorities, and to form an opinion as to its merits. We believe that their report was highly satisfactory to the inventor. The stamping of ' 000 letters was timed by them,: and that number was passed through the machine in nine minutes and thirty seconds. Three hundred letters were then stamped by the best stamper in the office, and these took him seven minutes and thirty seconds to complete. This person had been employed two years in the General Post-office, London, as a date stamper. The stamping of an English mail is the severest test which can be applied to the machine, as the letters adhere very much together, from the length of time they have been tied up. Three hundred letters, which had not been tied up, were stamped by the: machine and completed in two minutes five seconds. But no exact limit can, at present be placed upon the speed with which the machine can be worked, as the number of letters that can be stamped in a given, time entirely depends upon the speed with which -the person working the machine can feed it with letters, and they have been done much quicker each time the machine has been tried. Thus the mails which arrived \ on Friday last contained 6,610 letters, and the Post office messenger, William. Baynes, who worked and fed the machine passed that great number of letters through one at a time, in one hour and nine minutes; this was equal to 100 per minute all the mail through, and he was not in the least fatigued at the end of the work. To stamp this number of English letters by hand would occupy one person about five or six hours, and the probability is that he would be thoroughly exhausted before he finished them, and would have severely injured his hand and wrist by the i continuous concussion for so long a period.

We believe that numerous attempts hiojgj before now been made to invent machf^ Jv stamping letters, with greater or less sut« cess. The best we have heard of was one for a time in use i» the General Postoffice, London j but this, our informant tells us, required the letters to be all of about the thickness of a letter containing a single sheet of paper, and consequently they had to be picked for it, and this drawback rendered the machine useless. The greatest number done by this machine in an hour was, we are informed, 5,000. We consider the invention of a thoroughly practical machine of so useful and simple a character as the one -invented by Mr Wright, as a matter of which not only he, but the whole colony, has some just reason to be proud j and' we sincerely trust that his long and patient endeavors (for the invention has occupied his attention for nearly three years) may soon meet with a substantial reward. — ' Lyttelton Times.'