The Pforzheim Sorter
1965 · Letter Coding Desk · Work 752 of 1,871
A coding station of an automatic mail sorting installation of 1965 in the post office hall in Pforzheim, a pale grey enamelled sheet-metal tower two metres high with a front leaning backwards, in the front two narrow vertical slot tracks holding envelopes seen edge-on, from its top a slim pale conveyor arm curving overhead, in front a narrow pale box table carrying a compact keyboard unit with small round blank key tops and a small viewing pocket holding one envelope, back side toward the lens, a woman seen from behind on a round swivel stool, dark sleeveless dress, white pumps, a second identical station soft in focus behind, fluorescent light from above.
- What it was used for
- The first automatic letter sorting installation of the Deutsche Bundespost ran in the Pforzheim post office. Siemens gives 31 May 1965 as the date it was put into operation; on that account the plant consisted of 14 manual coding stations and 3 distribution carousels with 100 outputs each. A person read the address and keyed the postal code, whereupon the machine printed a bar code on the envelope and sorted by it. Siemens dates the start of development to 1958, jointly with the Posttechnisches Zentralamt; the trial ran, per postautomation.de, from October 1960 to February 1962 in Munich post office 2, where the coding station was designed for 5,000 letters per hour in the feed. Automatic letter sorting at the Pforzheim post office ran until 1998, per the same source.
- What was new
- What was new was the split between reading and sorting: the address was translated into bars once, by a person, after which the machine sorted by those bars. postautomation.de describes the method used in the Munich trial: each digit from 0 to 9 was represented by a 2-out-of-5 code using 2 bars — in luminescent or magnetic ink, from spring 1961 from plastic film coated with magnetic ink. The precondition was the postal code; paketda relays the Siemens claim that the Bundespost introduced it in 1961 as the first postal administration in the world. The barb: the maker of the first plant did not stay in the business. postautomation.de writes that Siemens & Halske ended production of letter distribution machinery in 1967 and sold its licences; from 1981 Pforzheim was converted to an AEG-Telefunken installation.