keeping American rolling

A railway yardmaster stays connected to the central office via pneumatic tubes, Chicago, Illinois, 1942:

There is so much to find of interest in this photo - the pinstripes and polished shoes, the cans of paint (?) and rags, the war effort posters, yesterday's newspapers and of course the bolts and metal and pipes smelling of grease, hammering and clanking away.

Gorgeous medium-format negative by Jack Delano for the Office of War Information, reposted from the Shorpy website. Further use of image on blogs to be attributed to Shorpy.

Washington Post

Choosing which museums to visit in Washington D.C. is a monumental task, but I had no hesitation about heading straight to the Smithsonian Postal Museum during my time off, on a recent work visit to the capital city. Certainly one of the museum jewels of the city, the museum is housed in the majestic old City Post Office building and hosts never-ending postal amusements to be entertained by, from collecting stamps to writing postcards.

After making my way past the gilt postal desks in the entrance way and then security, I walked underneath the sparkling ceiling of stamps straight into the little Pneumatic Tube Service exhibit. You can find a picture on the right, a little dark unfortunately because of the low lighting. The capsule exhibited is one of the highlights of the collection (follow the links to find some great video footage).  There is a little text on the systems built and used in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Boston and St Louis, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

While this part of the permanent collection is small, I did find some other pneumatic traces elsewhere, such as a telegramme, and a plethora of links online (start with the special section on Pneumatic Tube Mail).

I loved this postal museum, where you can make your own stamp collection from donated stamps and cancel postcards in different historical periods. There is a movie which shows how post moves through the U.S. postal system, which reveals some of the wonders of how letters arrive at their destinations - I experienced the same kind of fascination watching this film as I did as a child watching how crayons were made on Sesame Street. And at the end of the visit you can send your favourite postcards with carefully chosen stamps at the museums' own postoffice. Researchers who want to know more can arrange to visit the museum library on specific days of the month or by appointment - next time!

Image my own.

pneumatic tubes in literature 4

Two fantastic paragraphs from Slaughterhouse Five (p7) about the connections made between institutions, by the brass and velvet pneumatic tubes, sent to me by my brother-in-law Andy:

While I was studying to be an anthropologist, I was also working as a police reporter for the famous Chicago City News Bureau for twenty-eight dollars a well. One time they switched me from the night shift to the day shift, so I worked sixteen hours straight. We were supported by all the newspapers in town, and the AP and the UP and all that. And we would cover the courts and the police stations and the Fire Department and the Coast Guard out on Lake Michigan and all that. We were connected to the institutions that supported us by means of pneumatic tubes which ran under the streets of Chicago. 

Reporters would telephone in stories to writers wearing headphones, and the writers would stencil the stories on mimeograph sheets. The stories were mimeographed and stuffed into the brass and velvet cartridges which the pneumatic tubes ate. The very toughest reporters and writers were women who had taken over the jobs of men who had gone to war. 

For those interested in learning more about the Chicago Postal Pneumatic Tube Company, you may enjoy this thread on the Forgotten Chicago Forum, about the mysterious manhole covers in the city. 

Image of the Chicago Postal Pneumatic Tube Company from the University of Illinois Library.

fantasy post

Last week I mentioned a research scholarship from the Smithsonian National Postal Museum.

This museum certainly seems to have expertise in pneumatic post, with an online exhibition, details of a pneumatic post children's program and the story of a most wonderful piece of pneumatic mail with "fantasy markings". The markings "TUBE STA. / TRANSIT" were not applied by the Chicago Post Office to this piece of mail but rather later, mysteriously, at an unknown date. Postal historians followed various clues to try and uncover the story of this piece of mail, such as the style of lettering, lack of time and date, and the infrastructure of the pneumatic system in operation at that time.

The fantasy piece of mail reveals something about the social context of pneumatic post in Chicago during the early 20th Century; a little look into the past workings of a pneumatic system, through stamps and other markings.

Image of a cover transported in the Chicago pneumatic tube system from the National Postal Museum site.