1966: The MECHANISATION of the POST OFFICE | Tomorrow's World | Retro Tech | BBC Archive

"To cope with the rising traffic, the Post Office has launched the most ambitious scheme to mechanise the mail the world has ever seen."

Derek Cooper narrates a Tomorrow's World item about the continuing march towards mechanisation and automation in the Post Office.

Mail sorting has already been literally revolutionised, courtesy of a rotating drum sorter, which separates letters from larger packages. The letters are whisked off on conveyor belts, which divert them according to size and then space them out evenly so they can be fed through ALF - the Automatic Letter Facer - where they are franked for postage. Addresses across the country will be given special "postal codes" - some areas, like Norwich, Oxford and Watford already have post codes - to speed up delivery.

It is hoped that the adoption of technology will remove four human interactions for each of the 30 million letters posted in Britain every day, saving the Post Office millions of pounds.

At the Post Office Engineering Research Station, work continues apace by Doctor Combes, who is developing a machine that can actually read a written address.

One day, might the entire postal service be automated?

Clip taken from Tomorrow's World, originally broadcast on BBC One, Wednesday 2 November, 1966.




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