Pearson Hill

Mention has been made of the Pivot machines, invented by Pearson Hill, which were widely employed in the larger offices of Ireland from the late 1860s onwards. These machines were manually operated and enabled the sorting clerks to cancel mail rapidly.
They are regarded not so much as machines per se, but as mechanical assistance to what was still fundamentally a manual operation. True machine cancellation was develloped in Germany and the United States in the 1880s, following on earlier experiments by Rideout, Creswell and others in England, but Ireland was not used for any of these trials, and did not begin using machines until they were well established in Britain.