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A look at the U.S. Postal Service’s attempt to modernize in 1954
From post offices on wheels to automated stamp dispensers, the USPS was looking for innovative ways to process the 54 billion items mailed that year.
The nation's largest post office serves only two of New York's five boroughs—Manhattan and the Bronx. Yet it earns a tenth of United States postal revenue, and every day it dispatches an average 17 million pieces of mail, including 192,000 parcels. A kind of ordered chaos prevails inside the cavernous halls where this avalanche is handled. Here a pre-Christmas flood, swept in by conveyor belt, pours down a metal slide which employees dub "Niagara Falls." Parcels fly in many directions as clerks separate them by regions and States; elsewhere they arc sorted by cities and distribution centers.
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