Just one example: The Postal Service's OCR machines correctly translate the chickenscratch that passed for an address on 93 percent of hand-lettered envelopes. The rest of the most-excellent machines that the USPS has used through time are housed in the slideshow below.

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Despite these successes, there have been some hard times for the Postal Service. The biggest crisis USPS faced probably came in the mid-1960s. During that time, which was before Richard Nixon signed a bill that made the service "self-funding," the Post Office could not get enough funds from Congress to buy the machines they needed to keep up with the post-War explosion in the mail. In October of 1966 the situation came to a head, when, as the museum exhibit put it, "a flood of holiday advertisements and election mailings choked the system." The Chicago Post Office, the largest in the country, "stopped delivering mail for three weeks."

Automation was the only way out. Zip codes, which were only introduced in 1963, became the linchpin in the automated postal system. Imagine life without them: a single person can't sort more than a letter a second, which is at best, 3,600 letters an hour. With the help of machines, postal workers could gain almost an order of magnitude of speed, sorting 30,000 letters an hour. Also, zip codes formed the occasion for this wonderful music video about the introduction of the system. I believe it reaches Pynchonian heights of lyrical genius.

Despite this impressive legacy, the Postal Service is now back on the ropes. While there are a lot of reasons, the key long-term challenge is simple. For 200 years -- TWO HUNDRED YEARS -- the volume of mail that the postal service had to deal with grew. Then in 2006, the annual volume of mail flowing through the system peaked (though, as noted below, it grew into 2007 before starting to decline).

"There have been enormous challenges in the past, I don't want to downplay that at all, but this is the biggest challenge. It's bigger because it's so different. It challenges the one thing that has always been true: mail volume goes up," Postal Museum curator Nancy Pope said. "Mail peaked in 2007, and now for the first time, they're looking at what happens when there is less mail. And nobody at the Postal Service is ready for that. It's just mindblowing. Everyone has grown up with this idea. 'Mail volume goes up.' If you think something bad is coming down the road in five years, a mail price increase will solve it because mail volume goes up."

At the same time as mail volume is decreasing, people still want the ability to receive mail at any time and at any address they choose. As a result, the number of individual delivery points increased by 735,779. That is to say, the costs of maintaining the ability to distribute mail are going up, even though the volume of mail (i.e. revenue) is declining. The USPS has massive fixed-infrastructure costs built into its core as a national service committed to serving everyone.