How an industrial furniture used by each french post office became an icon of Industrial Design?

In the edge of the first war, it was created for the French post, also called “Tri Postal“.  This metal furniture was a clever system, designed to answer at best to the many times reproduced gestures and to the postures of the post-office employees in the sorting rooms. It can be considered like one of the first ergonomic furniture of the industrial era.

If we go back in its family tree, we can find two ancestors. Until 1850, they used to store the mail in wicker suitcases, and this mail was essentially made by stagecoach. But the industrial era, the arrival of the railroad and the succession of the rural mailman in most of the back countryside lead the post office to get organize and began to sort out the mail, which meant to supersede the wicker suitcases to wooden lockers. And this change has to be done in Europe quite as in the United States of America, where the Taylorism success to increase the productivity of the workers, in the first decades of the 20^th century, was going to introduce the idea of ergonomics.

So before the beginning of the First World War, the French post office becomes aware of the importance of the sorting operations. She began to study the gestures and postures of the workers, analysed their work behavior, and decomposed their movements, like the graphic designers are doing with their cartoons! Unfortunately, the approach remains empirical and few of these documents from that time were archived.

Those sorting desks were certainly not designed by chance…

The sorting work is hard and thankless. They are standing or sitting in front of the compartments, they select them of instinct, of a simple look, here comes their dexterity, the best of them can sort out till five hundred letters per hour!

The feet are working as pivots. The design of the desk, rectangle and orderly to have a vertical sort out, is supposed to offer an easy access to all compartments till the top one. But, according Mister Pascal Roman, scientist advisor at the Post Office Museum, “If the sort out work seems easy to anybody can read, its fast execution without any mistake makes the task more complex. After twenty letters, your thumb stands still or hinders the movements of the post office employee of which the amplitude has to remain nevertheless big.

Already, from 1912, some clerks had the idea of some circular desks, iron horseback or two pieces.”

We can find nowadays some vintage pieces, but be careful there are some replica (really bad ones…) on the market as well! Ask to find a vintage one!

At La boutique Vintage we regularly stock French Sorting Desks, visit us now.

Few dates:

-       Until 1850: Wicker suitcases

-       1914: Creation of the “circular” locker in wood

-       Between the two wars: appearance of the first metal furniture

-       1970: Lunch of the “CT40”, half moon, in plastic.