Pushing the envelope

For the digitally efficient late twentieth century, the letter is such an implausible artefact.  The to-do required to send it, the individual sorting, the hand delivery, the use of pieces of paper which actually have to be written in on some way - seems so primitive.  Which is probably why receiving one is such a joy.  We feel as the first kings and priests must have felt when a papyrus roll was sent to them; portable writing, whatever would they think of next?  And because letters are sealed, there is always that element of mystery, surprise, of limitless potential.  It may only be the gas bill, but it could have been the premium bonds.  And who knows? - tomorrow's post may bring a letter from a secret admirer.

Hard to believe, then, that the postman's knock was for many, until 1840, a thing to be feared.  Until that date and the invention of the postage stamp, it was the recipient who paid for the privilege of being sent a letter, an early and lightweight example of inertia selling.  Once Rowland Hill had the brainwave to charge the sender, the dynamics of the postal system were put on a proper, logical footing, and the service became popular and universally employed.

Today, there is a peak flow of several hundred million letters in the few weeks around Christmas.  Think of all that collecting and sorting and delivering; little of it is mechanised except for some of the sorting.  What is going to happen once this figure becomes a billion -  ten billion? Will the system be able to cope in its present form, or will it have to change utterly? 

The problem is that the amount of work involved in running a postal service increases with roughly the square of the number of users.  Treble the number of senders and you multiply the effort required by nine, because not only do three times as many letters have to be sorted, but they have to go to treble the destinations, which increases the sorting process slightly and the delivery process by a factor of nearly three.

As the world becomes a more closely-knit community, this dizzy growth will begin to occur.  Potentially there are probably already three or four billion letter senders out there; admittedly not all of them will want to send everywhere, but you can clearly foresee the day when the system cannot cope, when it is pushed too far by the sheer volume of letters.

The obvious solution is to replace mail with email, or electronic mail.  With this approach, letters and documents are held as computer files, and sent over telephone or dedicated lines as electrical impulses. They appear at the other end on a computer as the original file, and can then be printed out as 'hard copy' - a letter. 

For business, where speed and reliability is essential, this has to be the future.  But receiving from your loved one something as ghostly and evanescent as a file on your computer hardly has the same emotional impact.  It seems likely, then, that the letter and envelope will be with us for many years to come, even if their delivery becomes progressively more sporadic and delayed.  This might even add to the charm.

(28.12.91)

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