Skip to main content

Happy Birthday ZIPPY

On this day in 1963, the United States Postal Service gave birth to the ZIP code. "ZIP" stands for "Zone Improvement Plan," and they're designed to make sorting and delivering mail more efficient.
The idea of postal codes predates the zip code, having been introduced in 1943. They were used mostly in large cities where a number would represent a specific postal zone within the city. By the early 60's, a more organized system was needed. By October 1, 1963, the Post Office released Publication 59: Abbreviations for Use with ZIP Code, which contained the list of codes as well as the two letter state abbreviations that have been used since. Zip codes were optional at this time.
According to Publication 59, the two-letter standard was "based on a maximum 23-position line, because this has been found to be the most universally acceptable line capacity basis for major addressing systems", which would be exceeded by a long city name combined with a multi-letter state abbreviation, such as "Sacramento, Calif." along with the ZIP Code. The abbreviations have remained unchanged, with the exception of Nebraska, which was changed from NB to NE in 1969 at the request of the Canadian postal administration, to avoid confusion with the Canadian province of New Brunswick.
There are four types of ZIP Codes:
Unique: assigned to a single high-volume address
Post Office Box-only: used only for PO Boxes at a given facility, not for any other type of delivery
Military: used to route mail for the U.S. military
Standard: all other ZIP Codes.
The first three digits of the Standard code represent the part of the country the mail is going to, and the last two identify the post office within that region. Robert Moon is considered the father of the ZIP Code; he submitted his proposal in 1944 while working as a postal inspector. The post office only credits Moon with the first three digits of the ZIP Code, which describe the sectional center facility (SCF) or "sec center." An SCF is a central mail processing facility with those three digits. The fourth and fifth digits, which give a more precise locale within the SCF, were proposed by Henry Bentley Hahn Sr. The SCF sorts mail to all post offices with those first three digits in their ZIP Codes. The mail is sorted according to the final two digits of the ZIP Code and sent to the corresponding post offices in the early morning. Sectional centers do not deliver mail and are not open to the public (though the building may include a post office that is open to the public), and most of their employees work the night shift.
In 1983, the U.S. Postal Service rolled out "ZIP + 4," which added a hyphen and four additional digits to the end of the current ZIP code to speed things up even more. The first two digits of the addendum stand for a specific group of streets or cluster of large buildings, and the last two narrow it down further, specifying one side of the block or even one floor in a large building.
ZIP codes start with zero in the Northeast and get bigger as one moves south and west. There are more than 42,000 ZIP codes in the United States.
D79I1FXSRAR4T.CLOUDFRONT.NET

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bend and Stretch. Reach for the Stars. There Goes Jupiter, There Goes Mars...

On this day in 1976, during an interview on BBC Radio 2, British astronomer Patrick Moore announced that a very rare planetary event was about to take place—that Jupiter and Pluto would soon align in relation to Earth, and their combined gravitational pull would momentarily override Earth's own gravity and make people weigh less. He called it the Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect, and said that if people jumped into the air at exactly 9:47 a.m., they would experience a floating sensation. Moore signaled, "Jump now!" over the airwaves, and within minutes the BBC switchboard was flooded with calls from people who claimed it had worked. In 1957, the BBC TV show "Panorama" ran a segment about the Swiss spaghetti harvest enjoying a "bumper year" thanks to mild weather and the elimination of the spaghetti weevil. Many credulous Britons were taken in. In 1998, Mark Boslough fabricated a press release claiming that the Alabama legislature had legally...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tis for Today in 1925

Today is the birthday of the author and illustrator Edward Gorey, born in Chicago, 1925. His stepmother was the woman playing the guitar during the Marseillaise scene in Casablanca. The New York Times credits bookstore owner Andreas Brown and his store, the Gotham Book Mart, with launching Gorey's career: "it became the central clearing house for Mr. Gorey, presenting exhibitions of his work in the store's gallery and eventually turning him into an international celebrity." Gorey's illustrated (and sometimes wordless) books, with their vaguely ominous air and ostensibly Victorian and Edwardian settings, have long had a cult following.[7] He made a notable impact on the world of theater with his designs for the 1977 Broadway revival of Dracula, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Costume Design and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Scenic Design. In 1980, Gorey became particularly well known for his animated introduction to the PBS series Mystery! ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Night the Lights Went Out in Detroit

It was on this night in 1967 that a riot broke out in Detroit, marking the beginning of the decline of one of the greatest manufacturing cities in the country. An all-white squadron of police officers decided to raid an unlicensed after hours bar in a black neighborhood where there was a party to welcome home two recent veterans of the Vietnam War. The police stormed the bar, rounded up and arrested 85 black men. While they were arranging for transportation, a sizable crowd of onlookers gathered on the street, having witnessed the raid. Later, in a memoir, William Walter Scott III, a doorman whose father was running the raided bar, took responsibility for starting the riot by inciting the crowd and throwing a bottle at a police officer. After the police left, the crowd began looting an adjacent clothing store. Shortly thereafter, full-scale looting began throughout the neighborhood. The Michigan State Police, Wayne County sheriffs, and the Michigan Army National Guard were alerte...
Post a Comment
Read more