Sorting the mail by hand · Ceded (since 1965)

The Post Office Department puts a high-speed optical character reader into service at the Detroit post office in November 1965, the first machine to read addresses on live mail, at 36,000 letters an hour.

What was ceded is reading an address and putting the letter in the right pigeonhole, work that once filled whole floors of sorting clerks. The first readers handled only typed last lines, and handwriting took another thirty years. The Postal Service now states that machines read nearly 98 percent of hand-addressed letters and 99.5 percent of machine-printed mail. What is not ceded is the last stretch: the carrier who knows that the Dupont family moved, the clerk who opens a torn envelope to find out where it was going, and the operator who still keys the addresses no machine can make out.