Thomas Leavitt (inventor)

Thomas Leavitt (1827–1899) patented, along with his brother Martin Leavitt, the first machine in the U.S. that made machine-cancelled postal letters practicable, enabling the United States Post Office to increase the volume of mail it handled, quickening the pace of delivery and allowing customers to more easily send letters of various sizes.

Leavitt, a resident of Malden, Massachusetts, was born in 1827 at Hingham, Massachusetts, the son of Martin Lincoln Leavitt, and began working in the early 1870s on a continuous cancelling machine – one that could mechanically sort and stamp envelopes. The postage stamp itself was a relatively new invention, introduced in the U.S. in 1847, and within a couple of decades the volume of U.S. mail began overwhelming hand cancelling, the only practical method of cancelling each stamp so it could not be reused.

By the early 1870s, inventors in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, had introduced a machine which allowed the cancelling of postal cards of a standardized size, speeding their processing by eliminating the need for hand-cancelling. But a mechanism which would allow letters of various sizes, shapes and thicknesses to pass through a sorter proved a stumbling block.

In 1875 Thomas Leavitt and his brother Martin were issued United States Patent Number 175,290 for a device which would allow different sizes of letters to have their postage stamps cancelled. The two brothers tested their hand-cranked, hand-fed device at the main Boston Post Office under the watchful eye of postal workers. The device was largely a failure. But after more tinkering, Leavitt and his brother got a second patent (Number 192,519). The Leavitt brothers' second device is considered the first practical device in the U.S. for mechanized cancelling.

Backing Leavitt financially was Henry E. Waite, who advanced Leavitt money for construction of the initial model. Following the death of Martin Leavitt in 1877, Thomas Leavitt continued to work on the brothers' initial invention, eventually enlisting his cousin Elijah Leavitt Howard to help in his machine shop and perfect the device. Leavitt eventually received five patents for his mechanical sorting devices. Most of Leavitt's subsequent improvements were designed to improve the feeder mechanism for sorting envelopes of various sizes and shapes, as well as pulling each envelope through the rollers for cancelling.

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