An ever increasing volume of letters, a shortage of labour. “Here only machines can help cope with the deluge of letters,” says the speaker in Sieben Briefe pro Sekunde, a film produced by the communications technology company Telefunken, which develops automatic letter processing machines for the German Federal Post Office. Stamp recognition, format scanning, proper positioning of mail items for postmarks, printing of point codes to sort letters according to 100 destinations, bundling: all these processes must be completed by the machine reliably and at high-speed before the mailbags can be loaded onto trains, trucks and airplanes.