Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - All About ZIP Codes

Episode Date: December 15, 2020

Back in the day, sending letters was slow and potentially confusing. Nothing could travel faster than the speed of a horse or a ship, and addressing letters could be confusing if there were multiple people in a city. Over time, the postal system developed systematic methods to deliver the mail quickly and more efficiently. Learn more about ZIP codes and postal codes, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back in the day, sending letters was slow and complicated. Nothing could travel faster than the speed of a horse or a ship, and addressing letters could be confusing if there were multiple people in the same city. Over time, however, the postal system developed systematic methods to deliver the mail quickly and more efficiently. Learn more about zip codes and postal codes on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison.

Then your yoga teacher says that sex traffic children are being sacrificed. by satanic liberals, but it's all okay. The Great Awakening is coming. What is happening? Every week on Conspiratuality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family, and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation. This episode is sponsored by audible.com. My audiobook recommendation today is How the Post Office Created America by Winfred Gallagher.

Winford Gallagher presents the history of the post office as America's own story, told from a fresh perspective over more than two centuries. The mandate to deliver the mail imposed the federal footprint on vast, often-contested parts of the continent, and transformed a wilderness into a social landscape of post-roads and villages centered on post offices. It enabled America to shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy and to develop the publishing industry, consumer culture, and political party system. You can get a free one-month trial to Audible and two free audiobooks by going to Audibletrial.com slash everything everywhere or by clicking on the link in the show notes. In the late 18th century, if you wanted to send a letter, there weren't stamps, post offices, or even envelopes. You would write your letter on a piece of paper, fold it, and write the name and city of the person

you're sending it to on the outside. Then, at some point later, it would hopefully wind up in the hands of the person you sent it to. Postage was paid by the person who received the letter, not the person who sent it. If you addressed a letter, it might have nothing more than, say, Alexander Hamilton, New York City, and then the postmaster would have to figure out where that person lived and which one it was if there was more than one person by that name. Eventually, street names were used, but even here it was rather vague. Sometimes a street address would be approximate, such as Jane Smith at the corner of Chestnut and Third, or it might just say John Williams Market Street.

As cities grew, the confusion surrounding addresses grew with it. The first big innovation in the United States occurred in the 1840s in Philadelphia. They developed what is known as the Philadelphia system for street numbering. Numbering houses wasn't a new idea. It was first done in the 16th century in Venice when buildings in an entire district were numbered. There was no real order to the system. Numbers were designed more for tax purposes than for mail delivery. Likewise, assigning numbers based on the street of a building was also done in Europe, but the method for assigning numbers was very inconsistent.

The Philadelphia system is used almost everywhere in the United States today. In this system, each block on a street is assigned a segment of numbers, usually in units of 100. Odd numbers would be on one side of the street and evens on the other side. So on the first block of a street, all of the houses would be numbered between 100 and 199, and it's known as the 100 block. block. The next block would be the 200 block, and so on. So if you're walking from 108 Main Street to 513 Main Street, you know that you'll be walking four blocks and crossing the street at some point. The fact that most American cities have nice grid layouts makes the system work, whereas it might not have made any sense in European cities. So a system of street addresses was certainly an

improvement. However, as cities grew, even this could be confusing. Some streets were really long, and cities had lots of streets. By the time World War II started, there were over 20 billion letters being processed annually in the United States. In 1943, the United States Postal Service introduced postal zones code. The top 124 urban areas in the United States were given postal codes for different zones in the city. For example, if I was sending a letter to New York, I would now use New York 16 to delineate which zone in New York and which post office the letter should be sent to. This system was again an improvement, but it didn't cover most of the country, and the zones which were created were rather crude. What was needed was something that would extend the zone system across the entire country.

In 1963, the United States Postal Service instituted the zoning improvement plan, or zip. The zoning improvement plan divided up the entire country into zones with each zone having a five-digit code. These zip codes would be assigned to every address to greatly ease mail delivery. The biggest challenge wasn't the creation of the system, but rather getting everyone to go along with it. A great deal of money was spent on advertising and marketing to make people adopt zip codes. They even created a mascot known as Mr. Zip. Unlike other attempts to get Americans to change, aka the metric system, this one actually worked. Within 10 years, zip codes were almost universally used in the United States.

In addition to making the postal system more logical, using numbers also made automating postal sorting, much easier. The zip code system is very systematic. States are lumped together by numbers. All zip codes beginning with a zero, for example, are in New England. Everything beginning with a nine borders the Pacific Ocean. The 1963 zip code plan also introduced a system of two-letter abbreviations for states. Prior to this, there wasn't a consistent system of abbreviations, and some states like Alaska and Alabama would often be confused with each other. The only change to that state abbreviation system was in 1969 when Nebraska went from NB to N.E to avoid confusion with New Brunswick, Canada. As big of an improvement as the zip code system was, there was still room for

even more improvement. In 1983, 20 years after the implementation of the five-digit zip code, the postal system announced the Zip Plus 4 system. This was a further four digits tacked on to the end of the number which provided even more detail. Some high-volume recipients would receive their own zip plus four number. In most zip codes, a post office box will have its own zip plus four number. On top of that, within each zip plus four area, there are unique delivery point numbers. These are two-digit numbers that follow the zip plus four number, which uniquely identifies every address in the country. The nine-digit zip codes never caught on the way the five-digit ones did, but they're still used all the time by bulk mailers. Most people aren't aware that the United

States postal system also extends outside of the United States. states. There are three independent countries that are part of the system. The Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau are all within the U.S. postal system. They all have zip codes and state codes, and you can send anything to or from there for the same price as domestic mail. The state code for the Marshall Islands, for example, is MH, and the zip codes are 96960 and 9697. The United States is obviously not the only country to have adopted a postal code system. Almost every other country in the world has a postal code system as well. There are basically two types, a numeric system like the United States, which only uses numbers. This is also the case

in Australia and Germany. Then there are alphanumeric systems which are used in countries such as the UK and Canada. In Canada, the first part of each code is a letter that corresponds to the province. It starts with A in Newfoundland and goes all the way to Y in Yukon in the west, with some letters being skipped. Ontario has five letters assigned to it and Quebec has three. A Canadian postal code will have six characters, alternating letter number, letter, number, letter, number. The first three characters are the sorting station, and the last three identify the local delivery point. The UK also uses an alphanumeric system. They divide the country up into a bunch of regions, which are usually centered around a city. Each region has a one or two letter abbreviation. For example, Edinburgh is E.H, and Birmingham is B.

London has its own system based on points of a compass. For example, SE for Southeast, EC for East Central, and NW for Northwest. The British system doesn't have a set number of characters. It can be anywhere from 6 to 8 depending on the abbreviation. Also, all of the British territories such as Gibraltar and St. Helena have their own codes that fit into the British system, as do the Crown dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man. Only enough, many of the countries I listed all implemented postal codes around the same time. It was from the late 50s to mid-70s that most countries adopted their postal code system.

And I have to think, if we were to design such a system from scratch today, we'd probably develop a more consistent system which could be used by every single country. Post codes around the world have been adopted for many non-postal applications as well. There's a phenomenon called the Postcode Lottery or Zipcode Lottery, where some things like insurance rates or bank loans will be heavily influenced by the code that you live in. Mail is still pretty important, even if it's becoming less popular.

The United States reached its peak mail in the year 2000 when it delivered 104 billion pieces of first-class mail. The number delivered in 2019 was half that number, and it's decreasing every year. So the next time you send or receive a piece of mail, take a second to appreciate the organization and structure that went into the system to get you that, letter quickly and efficiently.

The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James McAla. Associate producer is Thor Thompson. Today's five-star review comes from podcast Republic listener Leon Laval Falks. He writes, Great podcast, concise, informative, well-spoken, and delivered with just enough personality to make it feel like he is speaking directly to me. This is the best podcast I have discovered recently. Thank you, Leon.

And by the way, I am talking to you. Just you, Leon, right now. Remember, if you have a five-star review, you too can have your review read on the show.