ROBOT LETTER SORTER

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 8 November 1935, Page 10

ROBOT LETTER SORTER

DEALS WITH 21,000 AN HOUR. ENGLAND’S EXPERIMENT. (From Our Own Correspondent —By Air Mail.) LONDON, Oct, 12. Robots are on the increase in England. The latest edmes in the form of a letter sorter, at Brighton, and by means of its aid ii> is "possible for one sorter to consign a letter to any one of 325 boxes in the course of an afternoon’s job. Hitherto lie 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 650 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 conveyer belt from tables on the ground floor, where stamping machines have post marked them af the rate of 600 a minute.

The keyboards cover a range of 325 numbers, and. every town or area of importance lias its. own number. Thus Eastbourne may bo No. 23, Liverpool 260, or Norfolk 300. The operator picks each letter from the moving belt, notes the address, drops it through an aperture and at the same time taps the code number of the destination town on the keyboard. The letter falls into a metal carrier which takes it to the correct box. Each sorter can deal with at least 40 letters a minute, and tlie 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 the “walks” of individual postmen. Postal packets and largesized letters cannot be accommodated by the machine and must continue to be dealt with by manual processes. Teams of sorters—27 sorting clerks for tlie 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.