Inventive Canadians – A New Series From E-TIPS®

This summer we will take a look at some of the more memorable Canadian inventions to have found their way through the patent system. Although Canada has a proud history of innovation, Canadian inventors aren’t often lauded to the same extend as their US counterparts. Throughout this series, we will shed light on a few of the inventors and their inventions that have contributed to Canada’s technological milestones. The primary author and contributor to this series is Richard Murphy, a new face around our office. A former New Zealand patent attorney, Richard has joined us as a technical consultant while he works toward his Canadian patent agent credentials. World’s First Automatic Mail Sorter In our first review (and following the recent postal strikes), we consider the advent of the automatic mail sorter, invented by Dr Maurice Levy. Levy conceived the automatic mail sorter in 1951, when working as a consultant for Canada Post. He developed a small scale prototype that was tested in 1953 and its success attracted funding from the federal government, enabling Levy to develop a full-scale mail sorter. Levy’s full-scale sorter, at the time capable of processing all the City of Ottawa’s mail, was assembled in 1956. The sorter utilised a computerised control system that routed letters through a series of conveyers and gates. The sorting process began with a postal worker entering the destination address of each letter into an address register and a destination bar code being printed on the associated envelope. The control system identified the destination of each letter from the bar code and directed the letter through the sorter appropriately. This full-scale mail sorter was capable of sorting 36,000 letters per hour, with an error rate of less than 1 letter in 10,000. At least three aspects of the mail sorter were protected by patents, including the code interpretation performed by the control system, the conveyor used to transport mail through the sorter, and the overall sorter configuration. Levy’s mail sorter was a world first. The system garnered international attention at the 1957 Postal Union Congress in Ottawa and attracted a contingent of US Congressmen to assess the feasibility of a similar system for the US Postal Service. Unfortunately, plans for nationwide implementation of the mail sorter were scrapped with the defeat of the Liberal Government in the 1957 election. The Conservatives pulled Levy’s funding and the sorter was never put to use by Canada Post. However, Levy was contracted by the US Postal Service to develop the first US automatic mail sorter, after Congress allocated $5 million to it (twice the amount spent by Canada Post), and the first such sorter to be used commercially went into operation in the Rhode Island post office in 1960. Summary by: Richard Murphy