italian notes on the pneumatics

Post from Italy ...

Images from a wonderful webpage entitled "alcune note sulla 'posta pneumatica'" (which I only wish that I could understand without the the morphing mediation of google translate), and a recent holiday in Sicily...

de la Poste

A must-see on a recent trip to Paris was the Musée de la Poste. Having been enticed by my brother-in-law-to-be's photos and having just missing out on seeing pneumatics at the Palais de Tokyo, I was waiting in anticipation for some time for this visit!

After having our tickets stamped at an vintage post office booth we wandered through the many levels of the intriguing museum. We threaded our way through postal technological history, and then saw what I had been waiting for - the tubes pneumatique:

Little scraps of leather and glass and metal from the system in a cabinet. While it was difficult to get a sense of the vast underground labyrinth from the display (although a map did help), the objects gave the network a materiality, imbued with a sense of the many connections made by pneumatic post.

pneumatic tube correspondence of the week 4

via Berlin Rohrpost

Image from wikipedia.

Pneumatic Tube at BASF 1916

Pneumatic Tube at BASF 1916, originally uploaded by BASF - The Chemical Company.

BASF recently posted this picture on their Flikr account. Pneumatic tubes, whilst famous for their mail systems underneath cities, were often used, and still are, for internal communication within companies. Seems a rather quiet picture, although I am sure that this sunny morning was far from it!