The previous century has seen technological advances nobody anticipated. Take the easy act of sending mail. Whereas the flexibility to ship materials to the following city or internationally has been round a very long time, the strategies have utterly remodeled. It as soon as took days, weeks or months to obtain a letter or bundle from afar, however now everybody expects to buy on-line at some point and obtain merchandise the following.
How did this evolution occur?
The postal system spurs commerce
Whereas the USA Postal Service was established in 1775, the primary U.S. postage stamps weren’t issued till 1847. After they have been first used, there have been considerations about stamp theft, and affixing them was not simple, as they required moistening.
On the 1893 World’s Honest in Chicago, the USPS hosted an exhibition displaying its first image postcards, together with the primary event-commemorative stamps. By the century’s finish, mail was delivered utilizing transportation strategies together with stagecoach, prepare and ship.
The flip of the century introduced elevated calls for on the postal system as mail order catalogs, launched by companies within the second half of the 19th century, turned commonplace. However, companies nonetheless discovered mailing and transport cumbersome and inefficient. Most stamps have been affixed separately!
Early improvements
Chicago inventor Arthur Pitney, a wallpaper salesman and skilled on adhesives, attended the World’s Honest in Chicago. He left the truthful impressed to rethink the postal course of. To eradicate the labor of hand stamping enterprise mail and to forestall stamp theft, Pitney invented the primary postage meter, patented in 1902.
In the meantime in 1908, Walter Bowes included The Common Stamping Machine Firm, which bought canceling machines to the Put up Workplace. These machines made it potential to mark stamps to forestall re-use. When Arthur Pitney and Walter Bowes collaborated to type The Pitney Bowes Postage Meter Firm in 1920, they modified the way forward for enterprise mail ceaselessly.
This yr Pitney Bowes celebrates their 100th anniversary. It was Sept. 1, 1920, that the USPS formally accredited the usage of their postage meter, adopted by the Posts in England and Canada two years later. Their improved product, constructed off Pitney’s authentic invention some twenty years earlier, the newly created Mannequin A mailing machine expedited the method of enterprise mailing, imprinting the postage quantity and postmarking the date. For companies, metered mail saved money and time whereas additionally offering correct accounting and mailing information – one thing we could take as a right at present, however a breakthrough within the early 1920s.
A century of change
The improvements saved coming. In 1939, Pitney Bowes, Inc. unveiled the “Mailomat,” a coin-operated postage meter and letter field. Recognizing small companies as a progress engine of economic system, the corporate developed the primary inexpensive postage meter for small companies within the early 1950s.
In 1951, Robert Pitney, Arthur’s son, was issued a patent for a remotely resettable meter. This invention would pave the best way for later improvements, from Postage by Cellphone in 1979, to at present’s means to reset postage on-line.
Signaling the top of the old school postage stamp, the primary self-adhesive stamps have been invented in 1979. Whereas the early model was unsuccessful, a greater adhesive was invented in 1989, shortly changing its predecessors.
The digital age
With the arrival of the web and e-mail, conventional mail naturally declined. Then got here the explosion of e-commerce, with prospects in every single place ordering merchandise on-line and anticipating them to be delivered to their door.
This supplied new alternatives for companies centered on transport options. For instance, Pitney Bowes partnered with eBay, growing know-how for eBay shippers to print their very own Postal Service labels from their accounts.
In recent times, the corporate has created technologically superior options so companies can streamline their mail processing and transport operations extra effectively than ever earlier than. In 2017 the corporate launched an all-in-one machine for companies to weigh mail, assess transport choices, print labels, kind and monitor a excessive quantity of packages and letters shortly and precisely.
E-commerce reveals no indicators of slowing down. On Cyber Monday 2019, the corporate’s International Service Companies platform printed over a million labels in a single day. At this level it is laborious to even predict the place know-how will lead enterprise subsequent.
To study extra about continuous innovation at Pitney Bowes and its advances for mail and transport over the past 100 years, go to PitneyBowes.com.
