Its buildings are out of date, over-crowded, poorly located, it lacks modern equipment and is struggling to handle an ever-growing volume of mail by old-fashioned hand-labor methods.

-Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield, 1957

In the effort to improve services with the personnel available, mechanization becomes as important as method. It calls for the installation of near-magic machines with electronic eyes that will sort mail at the rate of thousands of pieces an hour.

-Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield, 1960

Shortly after Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidential election in 1952, he named Arthur E. Summerfield as the nation's new Postmaster General. Under Summerfield's term (1953-1961), the Post Office Department (POD) experienced a research and development renaissance. Summerfield was another in a series of political "thank you" appointments, a member of the Republican party's top line and critical in throwing Michigan's support behind the noted general. Thankfully for the POD and the nation, Summerfield was no run of the mill party hack. He inherited a postal system that had suffered through decades of deprivation, with budgets and personnel drained through the 1930s and 1940s by the Great Depression and Second World War.

After World War II, the country was infused with a spirit of boundless energy, striving to create the world of tomorrow today. Summerfield, a product of private industry, was stunned by the static world of America's post offices in the early 1950s. Research and development, a phrase critical to American businesses, was almost unknown in the POD, thanks to tight Congressional purse strings. Summerfield hammered away at Congress (through back channels and in public pleas) to provide the Department with adequate R&D funding. The PMG's enthusiastic drive for modernizing the service freed some funds, although never the amount Summerfield believed the service required, during his tenure.

The system Summerfield inherited in 1953 operated much as it had fifty, even seventy-five years previously. Even in large city post offices, mail was moved, processed and sorted by human hands.  One of Summerfield's top objectives was to take postal workers' hands off of America's mail whenever and wherever possible. In an interview published in the U.S. News and World Report, Summerfield boasted that modernized post offices and equipment would "speed mail 30 to 50-percent faster."  Under the new PMG, modernization filtered into every postal crevice, from sales to transportation. Summerfield's watchword for post offices was "mechanization" - a series of machines that would carry letter mail (which at the time comprised 80-percent of all mail volume) as swiftly as possible through post offices.

Under Summerfield a number of R&D projects concentrated on aspects of mail processing now taken for granted as "hands-free" operations: culling, facing and cancelling, sorting, sacking and dispatching. He condemned the system he inherited as barely functioning and in danger of racking up historic debts. His response was a "long-range-possibly 10-year-program to build and modernize post office buildings and develop modern mechanical and electronic equipment to speed mail through post offices." The new machines in Summerfield's mechanization plan would have brains that could "read" and "remember," addressing separate pieces of mail according to size and "see" in order to automatically postmark stamps. To Summerfield, such a transformation was only possible if Congress would support the Department's R&D needs. Indeed, even with financial support, Summerfield knew he would be bidding for the nation's best research brains and engineers at a time when private industry was paying top dollar for the best and brightest. In an effort to tap into the minds of those he could not hire, Summerfield ordered postal officials to work with a dozen of the nation's best engineering and research firms to develop mechanical and electronic equipment to be used in freeing mail from what Summerfield termed "our bottleneck," the interior of the nation's big city post offices.

Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, and Silver Springs, Maryland's post offices were stages for some of the first pieces of mechanized and automated equipment to come out of this  push to modernize. Baltimore's post office led the way in 1956 with a mechanical parcel sorting machine armed with an electronic memory system. In Detroit's post office, mechanized help was in moving the mail itself, the installation of a conveyor system to carry letter mail through handling and distributing operations. In the Chicago post office, an overhead electric conveyor system moved mail from receiving platforms to its destination. Mailbags were placed on the conveyor upside down, and when they arrived at their destination, clerks opened the bag and the mail fell directly onto the work surface.

Silver Springs, Maryland's post office was the testing spot on April 10, 1957 for the Department's first semiautomatic sorting machine. At 13' tall, the Transorma Letter Sorting Machine was an imposing two-story operation. It housed a conveyor belt that carried mail to one of five keyboard operators. Operators keyed in a sorting code for each address, sending the letter on its way by letter tray into one of 300 chutes. At 15,000 letters per hour, the Transorma more than doubled the volume of hand-processed mail in the office. This machine and its descendants were more widely known by their acronym, MPSLSM (multi-position letter sorting machine).  

Mechanized keysort machines held two distinct advantages to mail processing - operators spent less time handling mail and could sort to many more boxes than possible in a manual system limited by arm-reach. A similar system, called codesort, required operators to read and abbreviate addresses into machine-readable format, after which the machine would select the right chute for each piece of mail. Because codesort machines were not limited by the operator's ability to memorize complex schemes, they were generally able to process mail more quickly and reliably. Summerfield's administration was a giant leap forward with at long last again matching America's postal needs with contemporary technology. By the end of the 1950s, money was flowing steadily into Departmental R&D. By 1969, more than a decade after Summerfield left office, $35.6 million of the Department's $7.5 billion budget was being directed to R&D. Engineers discussed dozens of opportunities, including electric mail delivery vehicles, cheaper optical character readers for smaller cities, and ZIP code voice recognition machines.

But even with the great modernization push of the 1950s, much ground had already been lost in the race to keep pace with America's ever-growing mail volumes. In 1966 the Chicago post office made national headlines when mail backups brought the office to a halt. Johnson's Postmaster General, Lawrence O'Brien, bemoaned that his Department was in "a race with catastrophe" unless critical personnel, finance and operations issues were addressed, and major changes instituted. These issues would soon be among the core topics addressed by the Kappel Commission, Congress, the White House, and the Post Office Department (by then led by Winton "Red" Blount, Jr.) in the discussions and debate that led to the establishment in 1971 of the U.S. Postal Service.

Capital investment demanded by punishing mail volumes and dramatic increases in mailing addresses continued to overwhelm available funds through the 1960s. But without Summerfield's push for creating a comprehensive plan to modernize the postwar post office, the troubling issues that so worried Postmaster General O'Brien would have been far more severe, possibly grinding not the Chicago post office to a brief halt, but bringing the national mail system to a standstill as millions of pieces of mail pushed post offices beyond capacity and postal employees beyond capabilities.