eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
THEY
DO THAT?
- How do they make mirrors?
- How do sword swallowers swallow swords?
- How does a Polaroid picture develop in broad daylight?
- How do camels go without water?
- How do they splice genes?
- How do they create spectacular fireworks?
How indeed?
Ever found yourself wide-eyed at the wonders of science? Awestruck by the arts? Mystified by the miracles of nature or the marvels of technology?
Relief is at hand. Within these pages answers abound. How Do They Do That? clarifies what used to mystify. It explains the inexplicable and makes known the unknown.
Here is a book for both the mildly curious and the grand inquisitor. Take a few hours or take a few minutes to browse through this repository of riddles revealed. You'll discover that it's not hocus-pocus that put the whole pear in the bottle of pear brandy or sorcery that suspends a suspension bridge. But if not by magic, how do they do that?
The answer awaits within. A questioner's cure, an anodyne of answers, How Do They Do That? is a puzzler's paradise.
Caroline Sutton, a graduate of Wesleyan University, fives in New York City, where she writes and edits for the Hilltown Press.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780062018526 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 08/31/2010 |
| Sold by: | HARPERCOLLINS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
How do they sort mail so that a letter you drop into a box in New York arrives at an apartment in Los Angeles a few days later?
When you hastily drop a letter into a mailbox, you might pause to check the collection times posted on the box, but beyond that you may never contemplate the massive operation of sorting and distributing mail which goes on around the clock — and largely behind the scenes.
The mail is picked up and taken either to a local branch office, or straight to a processing center, of which there are four in New York City. Different fates await the various classes of mail — registered, special delivery, and so on — but a first-class letter of standard size travels the following route.
The mail is dumped helter-skelter onto a wide conveyor belt. En route to the first machine, an automatic culler removes oversized letters and packages that can't go through the Mark 11 facer canceler. This machine (which is about waist high and is overseen by one or several workers) does just what the name implies: it faces the letters in one direction to facilitate later handling, and it cancels the stamp. The letters go in upside down, backward and forward. The machine sends those with stamps in the upper corners (or somewhere in the upper portion) through a canceler and into the first trays; those with stamps on the bottom corners are flipped by two overlapping rubber coils that rotate continuously. After being flipped, these letters shoot through a canceler and into other trays. The canceler, which thus finds the stamp wherever it is, contains an ultraviolet light that picks up aphosphorescent dye in the stamps, so letters with fake stamps or none at all will be caught and separated for return. The letters whiz through at a rate of 20,000 per hour.
If an oversized or bent letter gets into the machine by mistake and jams it, the operator must retrieve it immediately or he'll have a dozen rumpled letters backed up in an instant like a chainreaction highway accident. Should this occur, wrinkled letters and torn envelopes are handled manually during the remainder of the sorting process.
If all is running smoothly, neat stacks of canceled letters are collected by hand and taken to a huge letter-sorting machine, usually referred to as an LSM. At the Morgan processing center in Manhattan, the largest such installation in the world, there are seventeen LSMs, each consisting of twelve consoles attached to a large wall with 277 different bins. Two loaders place the letters upright in containers beside each console operator. A suction arm picks up one letter at a time and whisks it in front of the operator, who punches its zip code on two rows of keys on the console. The arm puts a letter per second in front of the operator, who must in that time find the zip (which is often scrawled and nearly illegible), press the right keys, and get ready for the next letter. If the mail is local, the operator looks only at the last two digits of the code, which represent the local branch; but if it's headed for California, he may have to punch the first three or all five, depending on the breakdown of areas. The first three digits indicate the zone, of which there are nine in the United States, and an area sectional center. (Omission of the zip code automatically causes a delay in service, as these letters are routed to manual handlers.) The numerals that are punched direct each letter into a slot on a large conveyor belt, which takes it to the appropriate bin, along with other letters designated for the same area. Five workers stand by the wall of bins and empty each bin when it's full into a cardboard tray, covered with a sleeve, to be sent to the proper destination.
First-class mail travels by air, so if your letter is not going to a local address or nearby state to which surface delivery is most expedient, it will be taken by truck to an airport. John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark airports are all equipped with postal facilities where mail is loaded onto the planes of whatever commercial airlines are available. It's possible that your letter could arrive at the airport only twelve hours after you mailed it, for the processing centers work continuously, handling 17 million pieces per day in New York City alone, with the greatest volume of mail at night. (The earlier you mail your letter the better, for the volume increases as the day goes on.) Most local mail can be delivered the following day; letters to nearby states (such as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts) may take two days; service from New York to California generally takes three days.
In Los Angeles, a postal facility at the airport sends the boxes of mail to the appropriate area processing center. There the letters again run through an LSM to be sorted for a specific local branch. Local post offices receive mail at night, sort it manually by street and block, and place it in the case of the carrier for that area. A letter carrier arrives early in the morning, picks up his batch of mail, sorts it by building, and makes his rounds. Once the ninenumbered zip system introduced by the Postal Service in February 1981 is fully operative, sorters aided by new technology will be able to sort the mail by precise block and house. The centerpiece of this new technology is the advanced optical character reader (AOCR), which is being used now to a limited degree. This extremely efficient, fully automatic machine faces, cancels stamps, and sorts — all at a rate of 40,000 pieces per hour. The only drawback is that the AOCRs can only handle envelopes of standard business size with typed or printed addresses and zips...
How Do They Do That?. Copyright © by Caroline Sutton. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.