Sorting Equipment

Mail was sorted by hand until the introduction of mechanisation in the latter half of the 20th century. When sorting by hand, postal staff stood at large, long, ‘facing tables’ - so called because the letters were sorted into rows with the addresses all facing the same way. This enabled the sorting of letters into areas and cities to be done more efficiently.

The mail was then bagged up and despatched to the appropriate main local sorting offices for further sorting and delivery. In the local sorting office, staff distributed the mail into a ‘sorting frame’ of pigeonholes, organising the mail into smaller delivery areas ready for the postman’s round. This way of processing mail, from letter box collection to front door delivery, persisted long after Victorian times.

Several factors changed this labour-intensive way of working. In the latter part of the 20th century, the cost of labour in the UK increased. At the same time, developments such as the building of motorways made transport more efficient. Progress in electronics allowed equipment and machinery to be more compact and versatile, and cheaper to buy and operate.

The Dutch 'Transorma' machine, which mechanised the way mail was sorted, was installed in Brighton in October 1935. It remained in operation until June 1968 when it was destroyed because it was too costly to keep in proper working order. Invented by L Marchand and Professor Andriessen, its name was derived from an amalgamation of TRANsportation and SORting of mail, together with the initials (M and A) of its inventors.

The first automatic letter facing and cancelling machines were first used at Southampton in 1957. Following initial trials in Norwich in the 1950s, post coding of all addresses was completed in 1974. A programme of mechanizing all main sorting offices was completed in 1987. Postcodes allowed automatic letter sorting, by a new generation of electronic machines.

There have been several ‘generations’ of automatic letter sorting machines, each one more advanced than the previous model. Automatic letter sorting machines now have Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology - they can read handwritten envelopes. They can sort tens of thousands of letters per hour.

Our collection has examples of early stamp cancelling machines, sorting office equipment, furniture and artefacts. We have automatic letter sorting machines and coding desk suites. Charts, engineering drawings and specifications, plans and books can be ordered and seen in our Search Room. The main archive class to study is POST 17, Mail Handling 1797-1922.