If there was ever a good intention on the road to hell, it was that of Robert Moon, who died on April 10th aged 83. His laudable aim, in which he succeeded brilliantly, was to speed the delivery of America's mail. But his deceptively simple scheme rapidly turned the demographic world on its head, brought unheard-of refinement to social discrimination, and unleashed an ever-growing mountain of junk mail.
Robert Moon invented the US postal code. For the first 50 years of the 20th century, Americans used the post mainly for social letters, carried across the country on 10,000 mail trains and sorted in transit. By the late 1950s, however, two simultaneous developments were bringing the system to its knees. The railways were in precipitate decline, and equipment had been invented which enabled businesses to generate personalised mass mailings. Suddenly, millions of pension cheques, electricity bills and mortgage payments arrived by post. By the early 1960s they accounted for 80 per cent of the traffic.
In 1962, President Kennedy appointed an advisory board to cope with what was rapidly turning into a crisis, and Robert Moon was at last able to ride his hobby-horse. At the time, he was a postal inspector in Philadelphia and had been tinkering with various distribution schemes for 20 years. He had unsuccessfully offered two improved versions to the US authorities, however, his final version was grabbed by the advisory board and put into operation on July 1st, 1963.
His Zoning Improvement Plan (Zip) was wonderfully simple and organisationally brilliant. The entire US was broken into 10 zones, starting from zero on the east coast to nine on the west. A second digit was added for the regional sorting centre, a third for the sectional sub-division, and so on. By the time the Zip code had reached five digits it could define almost any address to within a few city blocks.
It took a while for the public to accept this addition to its addresses, but the scheme hit the marketing world like a bombshell. Detailed census information released by the government could isolate a maximum of 424 households in any given area. Someone quickly realised that marrying this census material to the areas defined by the Zip code could offer an extraordinarily detailed profile of the population.
Anyone wanting to send material to, say, college-educated whites with above-average incomes, suddenly had a much more precise tool. Rather more sinisterly, insurance companies had been handed a mechanism to "redline" specific high-risk areas (usually poor and black), and to load their premiums accordingly.
The success of Robert Moon's scheme, which allowed each of thousands of machines to sort more than 500 letters a minute, brought widespread imitation around the world. Hard behind, naturally, came the marketeers to ensure that millions more doormats could be littered with unsolicited post.
The addition of four further digits has enabled the US Zip code to define an address down to a specific building, and it is now possible to classify any postal area according to 62 separate criteria - ethnic composition, median income, mobility, education, spending patterns, and on and on. None of this was ever, of course, envisaged by poor Robert Moon, who was just trying to do his best by his employers.
Robert Moon was born in Williamsport, Pennysylvia, on April 15th, 1917. His mother died when he was young, and his father, a grocer, went bankrupt during the Depression. He won a scholarship to Duke University, but could find no work to support him away from home. So instead, he became a postman in his home town.
If the marketing industry had any soul it would raise a gold-plated statue to the man who inadvertently gave it the keys to the kingdom.
Robert Aurand Moon: born 1917; died, April 2001