travel by tube "a thing"

The Hyperloop continues to make news and continues to be linked to pneumatic tubes. See the latest in this article in Automobile, which calls the Hyperloop a "series of powerful pneumatic tubes", or the human equivalent of the plastic tubes in bank drive-thrus.

Image from Kevin Krejci's Flickr, used under the Creative Commons lisence.

the last of the drive-thru banking tubes?

The Drive-Thru has always fascinated me. How the act of getting out of your car becomes too much work. Having grown up in Australia, I mostly know drive-thrus from fast-food outlets (how can I forget the head-sets, beeping fryers and frantic burger orders of my high-school KFC job!). In the US however, drive-thrus are used for all manner of services: mail, coffee, pharmacies, and banks.

Until recently, many drive-thru banks used pneumatic tubes. When I read comments to online articles on pneumatic tubes, there are invariably a string of anecdotes and memories of bank drive-thru pneumatic tubes. According to a New Jersey website, we might be seeing the last of these banking tubes however. Their numbers are dwindling. The down-sizing is taking place in the context of down-sizing of banks more generally, as banking cultures change.

Not everyone likes to do their banking online or at an ATM however. For some, there is a reassurance in the personal transaction. And for others, there is just the fun of sending money into a vacuum.

documents and other objects, flying around

I've been doing a bit of flying in and out of Amsterdam's Schiphol airport recently. During one trip I visited a branch of my bank, to ensure my debit card wouldn't be blocked in the U.S. I had heard that there were pneumatic tubes connecting several branches of a bank in the airport. But there were no signs of the system to be found. Until I opened up my email back in Maastricht that is ...

There was a message from Patryk Wasiak, a cultural historian I met in Copenhagen recently, at the History of Infrastructure conference. And with his note was a scanned picture from a 1981 edition of the "Przeglad Techniczny" (Technical Review). Patryk tells me that the image (below, and enlarged above) accompanied an article about the recently opened airport terminal, celebrating its technological marvels. The caption for the photo says the airport pneumatic tube system was used to transfer travel documents between old and new terminals.

There are so many hidden networks and infrastructures in airports to which travellers are oblivious. We mostly think about how our luggage arrives, or how to get to our gate. We are the moving bodies, maybe our luggage too. But there is a whole manner of different kinds of travelling occurring in these places. Documents from one building to the next in the 1980s. Money between bank branches. Animals in and out of quarantine, nearby nature reserves, crates and cages (see more in Susanne Bauer and colleagues' work on animal ecologies in airports). For non-places, there is a lot moving around behind the departure lounge drudgery and duty-free gloss!