Arthur Pitney filed a patent application for the first postage meter in 1901, but it wasn’t until he teamed up with Walter Bowes in 1920 that the concept caught on.

The December 1921 issue of Popular Science, featured this image of a postage meter imprint, and the accompanying article starts by asking readers, “have you received a piece of ‘metered mail’ yet?” Apparently, many had not yet received one, but the magazine successfully predicted that they would before long, since “the newly invented postage meter is being adopted by many large companies to speed up their outgoing mail.”

Pitney Bowes Model M. Wikipedia image.

The magazine shows a Pitney-Bowes Model M postage meter, which had received the seal of approval from the U.S. Post Office on September 1, 1920, and which was named in 1986 an “International Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark” by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

If you’re like me, you now have this song running through your head. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the 1983 commercial version, but here’s the original from 1922: