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| Keywords: RabinowJacob 056.jpg Overall view of the laboratory prototype machine developed for the Post Office for the automatic high-speed sorting of letter mail It can sort at the rate of 36 ooo letters per hour into as many categories as may be needed It consists essentially of a large number of pockets on an endless conveyor and electromechanical equipment that controls the dropping of a letter from a pocket into a specific fixed receptacle As can be seen in the photographs fourteen pockets are grouped together into a single unit for convenience of handling on the conveyor In 1957 Jacob Rabinowâ ‚¬ „˘s company Rabinow Engineering designed a mechanical coding and sorting system for the U S Post Office Based on similar work Rabinow had done previously for the Census Bureau the system for the Post Office consisted of a conveyor belt cart designed to carry 12 envelopes in separate compartments Each compartment in the cart was accompanied by an escort memory The escort memory consisted of a shaft carrying a series of nylon code wheels Each of the 134 wheels could move laterally into one of two positions With this combination more than 8000 in decimal notation binary numbers could be set Twelve keyboard operators would read envelope addresses and set the positions of the code wheels The wheels were supported on a track also composed of binary elements When the encoded compartment hit the same encoded position on the track the shaft dropped triggering a door release in the compartment holding the envelope The envelope then fell into the appropriate pocket About 600 of the letter sorting machines were built and used by the Post Office In later operations optical character recognition technology replaced the keyboard operators and the mechanical escort memory was replaced by computer memory Reference Inventing for Fun and Profit Jacob Rabinow San Francisco Press San Francisco CA 1990 pp 100-138 National Institute of Standards and Technology 4/1/1958 National Institute of Standards and Technology PD-USGov-NIST PD-USGov Postal equipment | ||||
