archaeological fragments of a mystery

A follow-up on last week's post about the Dreyfus Affair, for at the train station the other day I spied an intriguing poster for a new book by crime writer Robert Harris:

Harris has written a historical fictionalised account of events surrounding the Dreyfus Affair, from the perspective of Colonel Georges Picquart, whose tireless investigations led to the ultimate release of Alfred Dreyfus from imprisonment.

A petit taster. Paris, 1896. Colonel Georges Picquart has handed his trusty officer Lauth the infamous cone of torn-up documents without looking at them yet:

He dons his apron, and while he fetches his box of equipment from his cupboard, I empty the paper sack over his desk. Immediately my eye is caught by a sprinkling among the white and grey of several dozen pale blue fragments, like patches of sky on a cloudy day. I poke a couple with my forefinger. They are slightly thicker than normal paper. Lauth picks one up with his tweezers and examines it, turning it back and forth in the beam of his powerful electric lamp. 

"A petit bleu," he murmurs, using the slang expression for a pneumatic telegram card. He looks at me and frowns. "The pieces are torn up smaller than usual." 

"See what you can do." 

It must be four or five hours later that Lauth comes to my office. He is carrying a thin manila folder. He winces with distress as he offers it to me. his whole manner is anxious, uneasy. "I think you ought to look at this," he says. 

I open it. Inside lies the petit bleu. he has done a craftsman's job of sticking it back together. The texture reminds me of something that might have been reconstructed by an archaeologist: a fragment of broken glassware, perhaps, or a blue marble tile. it is jagged on the right-hand side, where some of the pieces are missing, and the lines of the tears give it a veined appearance. But the message in French is clear enough.

The message implies another officer's guilt and Dreyfus' innocence. The discovery is a pivotal moment in the plot, one that the characters return back to. Harris reconstructs the story from fragments and shards of documents himself, breathing life into that moment. The Evening Standard declares that Harris is committed to the belief that "you can get at a truth as a novelist in a way you can't as a historian - you can bring things alive, the sense of fear, prickly fear, the sweat, the smell of the place and so on".

For those who like the book, apparently the idea came from a lunch with Roman Polanski. So look out for the film soon!

pneumatic tubes in literature: an updated list

Some further additions to the literature list, from my own reading and some help from the Wikipedians:

Paul Auster: Invisible

Jordan Belfort: The Wolf of Wall Street
Edward Bellamy: Looking Backward
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
Jessica Grant: Love in the Pneumatic Tube Era (in Darwin's Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow, edited by Zsuzsi Gartner)
Robert Harris: An Officer and a Spy
Shena Mackay: The Atmospheric Railway: New and Selected Stories
Ian McEwan: The Innocent
Anne Michaels: The Winter Vault
George Orwell: 1984
Marcel Proust: The Way by Swann
Neal Shusterman: The Downsiders
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five

Further additions courtesy of Wikipedia:

Umberto Eco: The Prague Cemetry
Theodore Fontane: Frau Jenny Treibel (1892)
Moreton Freedgood (pen name John Godey) (1973): The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
Robert Heinlein (1949): Gulf
William Marshall: Faces in the Crowd
Albert Robida (1882): The Twentieth Century
Jean-Paul Satre (1945): The Age of Reason
Jules Verne: Paris in the 20th Century
Michel Verne (1888): An Express of the Future
Michel and Jules Verne (1889): The Day of an American Journalist in 2889



Please add to the list in your comments!

(to come - pneumatic tubes in film and TV)

pneumatic poetic

Nostalgic memories of pneumatic tubes in department stores in Edinburgh have inspired a recent poem by information designer and artist Steve Smart. Called 'The Divvy' the poem appears on his website 'Subjects, Objects, Verbs'. I highly recommend reading this wonderful poem for a sensorily rich evocation of the "secret innards of Co-Op central", also known as the "limbic original intranet of things".

pneumatic tubes in literature: the beginnings of a list

After writing numerous posts now about appearances of pneumatic tube systems in fiction, I thought it would be worthwhile to start a list of these books. Most books I have come across rather randomly, so if you can think of any others to add to the list please add them in the comments!

Paul Auster: Invisible
Edward Bellamy (1888): Looking Backward
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
Shena Mackay: The Atmospheric Railway: New and Selected Stories
Ian McEwan: The Innocent
Anne Michaels: The Winter Vault
George Orwell: 1984
Marcel Proust: The Way by Swann
Neal Shusterman: The Downsiders
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five

tubes: behind the scenes

Referencing the infamous Ted Stevens comment about the internet, Andrew Blum has written a book simply titled Tubes. 

The book may be of interest to some readers of this blog, not only for the title, but also because, according to the New York Times book review, it examines the materiality of technology. Here is a section from the book:

I have confirmed with my own eyes that the Internet is many things, in many places. But one thing it most certainly is, nearly everywhere, is, in fact, a series of tubes. There are tubes beneath the ocean that connect London and New York. Tubes that connect Google and Facebook. There are buildings filled with tubes, and hundreds of thousands of miles of roads and railroad tracks, beside which lie buried tubes. Everything you do online travels through a tube.

I haven't read the book but am intrigued, not only by Blum's pursuit of fibre cables, but also by another section of the book quoted in the book review, where Blum learns that the Internet in has a smell, "one he describes as 'an odd but distinctive mix of industrial strength air-conditioners and the ozone released by capacitors'". This reminds me of the smell of engine rooms I have visited to see the hub of pneumatic tube activity. So often the sensory dimensions of the internet are forgotten in the focus on the ephemeral and virtual, but this technology too, so this book promises to tell us, also has multisensory, material dimensions.

Thanks Andy for the link.

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.

love underground

Jennifer Ouellette has just added a new book to my reading list in her blogpost on pneumatic tubes for Scientific American. It's called The Downsiders by Neal Shusterman. Who can resist a tale of underground romance?

catching a blue

Today I received a knock on my door and a colleague, Joeri, kindly handed me some papers. It wasn't pneumatic post, but close to it: Molly Wright Steenson's article on the Poste Pneumatique in the latest issue of Cabinet Magazine.

Molly Wright Steenson, otherwise known as girlwonder, is a Architecture PhD candidate at Princeton University, and previously known for her Ignite video on pneumatic tubes. Her article, Interfacing with the Subterranean, provides a meandering journey through the historical sewers of pneumatic engineering in Paris and other cities in Europe (such as Marseilles, see above).

In the article she discusses various workers associated with delivering the petit bleus, such as the petit facteur télégraphiste (telegraph delivery boy) and the tubiste (postal worker), as well as the sounds and obstructions in the system which I will explore further in future posts.

Towards the end of the article, Steenson puts forward her argument: the pneumatic tube system in Paris was both circulation and respiration for the city, and that as such was regarded as part of healthy progress. She writes (p86):

"The pneumatic tube network is a system that breathes, eats, circulates, fires synapses, and excretes; its structures are lungs that store air, pumps that move their charges, circuits that fire electrical impulses, devices that read them, mouths that swallow, and cloacae that expel"

I like this cyborgic corporeal-mechanical image, which resonates with my own way of thinking about pneumatic tube systems. I can't help but think of the wonderful images of Fritz Kahn, aesthetic master of the machine-body metaphor. I wish every knock on the door came with such inspiring post!

Image from Wikipedia.

breathing new life into history

I received this announcement in my inbox over the weekend, which is seems to be some kind of good news following the the bad news for medical historians last year:

"Dear MEDMED-L Colleagues,

Many of you may have heard last year that the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine in London—which was tied to University College, London—was shutting its doors. I've now learned that the Centre has been given a new lease on life, but with a much more circumscribed mandate. It will be tied not to the History faculty at UCL but to the the Biological Sciences Division of the Faculty of Life Sciences. Its focus will be solely on the history of the neurosciences "and related fields."

You can find the new director's announcement at this link:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/histmed/library/new_centre."

On another historical 'note' I have added a new book to my reading list after learning that Rosalind Williams will be receiving an honorary doctorate in the Netherlands soon:

I have never read any of Rosalind Williams' work but am looking forward to a book about "real and imaginary undergrounds" from a historian "who uses imaginative literature as a source of evidence and insight into the history of technology". I already like the choice of image on the front cover of her book - one of my favourite Andreas Gursky photographs.

Image from Rosalind Williams' website.

long live lovely long sentences

Short is sweet. Tweet is short. Contemporary communication is all about brevity, as Jenny Cool writes in her recent Savage Minds post. But what about the wondrous, locaquious, seemingly endless enjoyment of a lovely long sentence?

In celebration of the long sentence, here is one I came across in the book I am reading at the moment, The Way by Swann's by master of the long sentence, Marcel Proust, so please stay with me, there are pneumatic tubes mentioned at the end (and also for your reference, the sentence follows a brief passage concerning Monsieur Swann's tortured struggle between playing hard to get and his desperation to see the the vixen Odette).

"And yet at this point a slight irritation or physical discomfort - by inciting him to consider the present moment as an exceptional moment, outside the rules, one in which even common wisdom would agree that he could accept the appeasement afforded by a pleasure and allow his will, until it might be useful to resume the effort, to rest - would suspend the action of the latter, which would cease to exert its compression; or, less than that, the memory of something he had forgotten to ask Odette, whether she had decided which colour she wanted to have her carriage repainted, or, with regard to a certain investment, whether it was ordinary or preferred shares that she wanted to buy (it was all very well to show her that he could live without seeing her, but if, after that, the painting had to be done all over again or the shares paid no dividends, a lot of good it would have done him), and like a stretched rubber band that is let go or the air in a pneumatic machine that is opened, the idea of seeing her again would spring back from the far distance where it had been kept into the field of the present as an immediate possibility" (p 309, Penguin edition translated by Lydia Davis).

Image from the Motor Filatelisten Nederlands.

winston

When I was searching for images for a lecture I am giving tomorrow on surveillance medicine, I happened to come across this fantastic cartoon by Abner Dean.  It shows Orwell's Winston at his speakwrite (see previous post), with pneumatic capsules falling onto his desk.

Image from The Fugue's Flikr page.

the invisible work of pneumatic tubes

When I was in Japan I read 1984 for the first time. It seemed a pretty timely thing to do straight after a science and technology conference. Of course so much of George Orwell's futuristic vision has played out in real-time (one of the papers I mentioned in the last post, about telemonitoring of patients in their own home, springs to mind immediately), whilst other aspects remain in the realm of fantasy and fiction.

An important part of Orwell's 1984-future, at the organisational level, was communication via pneumatic tube.

"With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece and put on his spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk" (p40).

The pneumatic tube was one of three important 'orifices' in Winston's office space - the other two were for newspapers and the waste-disposal slit, or memory hole. It is from the pneumatic tubes where most of Winston's work arrives; the work of rewriting history. One day there is fragment of paper which blatently documents the lies behind this history work, rolled up with the other papers in the tube.

The pneumatic tube system is part of the invisible workings of the Ministry, part of the invisible work of totalitarian control:

"What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms" (p42).

In many ways, pneumatic tubes are still part of the invisible work of organisations, retaining that historic/futuristic feel that Orwell captures incredibly well in 1984. It is this invisible work, the work that happens backstage, that makes pneumatic tubes such an interesting site of analysis and a technology which captures the imagination of writers and the public.

not just a big truck

Several days ago, the former US Senator Ted Stevens died in a plane crash in Alaska. A strong opponent of net neutrality, he famously, or infamously referred to the Internet as, not a truck where you dump things, but rather a "series of tubes" (see this excerpt from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart for a send-up and mention of pneumatic tubes - dubbed the information supertube - at the end, or here for a Techno Remix of Stevens' words).

The phrase, "a series of tubes", has been used by many in reference to pneumatic tubes, with links made between this communication/transportation technology and the Internet.

Image by Molly Steenson, taken at the New York Public Library whilst she was researching for her presentation "A Series of Tubes" about pneumatic tubes.

call for papers

A Call for Papers has just been put out by the journal Philosophy and Technology. They write that:

"Technologies have been changing the world for a long time, at an increasing pace, with ever expanding scope and unprecedented impact. They profoundly affect human life and are radically modifying not only how we interact with, shape, and make sense of our world, but also how we look at ourselves and understand our position and responsibilities in the universe"

I'm not sure how considerably pneumatic tube systems are changing our position within the universe, but it is certainly interesting to think about how a 19th century, industrial era technology is changing hospital practices.

I took this photo at my favourite medical museum, Museum Boerhaave, in Leiden, Netherlands.

further tales from the underground

I have recently finished reading the chapter about Alfred Beach's pneumatic underground idea in Paul Collins' Banvard's Folly: Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck . There is a wonderful section in this chapter which describes the opening of the doomed Beach Pneumatic Transit Company, 260 Broadway in New York City. When reading this passage, I couldn't help but recall the sets of several recently released films, so have inserted pictures from these between the text (any guesses which films?).

Collins describes how journalists and politicians arrived at an unassuming building for the opening where they were ushered down the back steps into a cellar.

However it was no longer a cellar anymore but a comfortable office, and a few steps down, guests found themselves in a room

“120 feet long and ablaze with gaslit chandeliers, spread out before them ...

... Fine paintings hung upon the walls, lavish tables of champagne and hors d’oeuvres had been laid out, a fountain glittered with its stock of goldfish, and sumptuously upholstered couches awaited the visitors; in one corner a piano was playing, its notes echoing through the subterranean lair … beyond the edge of this cavernous room, brilliantly lit up, lay something that no New Yorker above or below had seen before: a subway car” (From Banvard's Folly, p156).

One wonders whether these set designers were inspired by the evocative image of pianos and champagne and other treasures underground? Banvard's Folly is a great read, and one that I would recommend if you are interested not only in a good story, but also some of the economic, political and other social events shaping pneumatic tube technologies of the past.

following a pneumatic capsule

How do you follow a capsule in the pneumatic tube system, during its travels around a hospital in one day?

Two of my favourite academics, Annemarie Mol and Jessica Mesman, talks about the limits of following actors, in reference to actor-network theory and a hospital ethnography:

J had read that she should follow the actor. But after following the medium care neonatologist around for a day, J came home exhausted because the man walked so fast. And what about the pieces of paper that travel from ward to the dispensary? J couldn’t enter the hospital’s postal system with them, for its plastic tubes were big enough for forms, but far too small for human bodies (Mol and Mesman 1996, p422 – 423)

I have been thinking about the challenge of literally following a capsule. There have to be other ways of mapping the life of a capsule as it traverses a hospital system, that do not involve being shrunk to the size of a pathology sample Innerspace style.

In a previous post I referred to a German video where a camera had been sent on an explosive journey through a pneumatic tube system. Perhaps another method may be to attach a GPS tracker to a capsule? Take for example artist Jeremy Wood's 'Traverse me: Warwick campus map for pedestrians'. The intricate GPS drawing is a personalised tour of the university's campus, compiled over 17 days of walking with a GPS device. The map has also been superimposed over photographs of some of the locations Jeremy Wood visited on his travels. Is this one way to draw a day in the life of a pneumatic tube capsule?

Image 89 or is that 68?, originally uploaded by pathlost on Flikr.

pneumatic sounds

In previous posts I have commented on the sounds of pneumatic tubes, and lately I have been having some fantastic conversations with my brother-in-law about the acoustics of these hospital systems. Andy has previously directed me towards great sounds sites such as soundtransit and the soundscape journal.

In hospitals, I remember reading on a hospital ethnography mailing list about Lindsey Messervy's Masters of Design Ethnography topic on the sonic environment of hospitals (I have looked but cannot find any further information about the project, and any links would be greatly appreciated). Anthropologist Tom Rice has published work on the acoustics of cardiac auscultation and the stethoscope, whilst hospital artist-in-residence John Wynne discusses the auditory dimensions of his collaborative work with photographer Tim Wainwright on a transplant ward at Harefield Hospital (both of the hyperlinks in this paragraph have audiofiles included).

The sound of pneumatic tubes was mentioned in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (February 11 1993, 328 (6): 433 - 437) entitled "Pandemonium in the modern hospital". Author Gerald Grumet notes that "a pneumatic-tube carrier arrives with a 88-dB(A) thud". I can't help but include a longer quote from this article:

"The modern hospital, where the previously serene milieu is gradually being debased by a sonic assault on the ears and psyche. The hospital atmosphere of the 1940s and 1950s was one of austere silence, as in a library reading room. Hallways displayed a ubiquitous picture of a uniformed nurse, finger to the lips, sometimes accompanied by the words, "Quiet Please." Signs on the street read, "Hospital Zone - Quiet." The occasional overheard page for a physician signaled a true emergency. But that subdued setting has gradually been replaced by one of turbulence and frenzied activity. People not dart about in a race against time; telephones ring loudly; intercom systems blare out abrupt, high-decibel messages that startle the unsuspecting listener. These sounds are superimposed on a collection of beeps and whines from an assortment of electronic gadgets - pocket pagers, call buttons, telemetric monitoring systems, electronic intravenous machines, ventilator alarms, patient-activity monitors, and computer printers. The hospital, designed as a places of healing and tranquility for patients and of scholarly exchanges among physicians, has become a place of beeping, buzzing, banging, clanging, and shouting" (Grumet 1993, p433).

I wonder if there are any recordings of the austere silence of serene days gone by? This seems rather romantically nostalgic to me. Or have advances in technology meant that there are more sounds in the hospital? Has the pneumatic tube been a rumbling constant through the years, or has that also changed? Do these sounds detract from hospitals as places of healing as Grumet suggests, or are they part of the therapeutic soundscape?

academic pneumatic

Occasionally I come across the specific mention of hospital pneumatic tube systems in academic material. This might be in a hospital ethnography for example, such as CT Suite: The Work of Diagnosis in the Age of Noninvasive Cutting.

"In one corner of the Scheduling office there is a pneumatic tube column. Forms and schedules are placed in cylindrical containers and launched to destinations throughout the department - mostly on the second floor. This system has been around 'for a long time'; a change to a computerized tube system is anticipated" (p184)

I am half-way through CT Suite, which is an intricately detailed study of the practices associated with CT scanning. In his work, anthropologist Barry Saunders combines theoretical insights from a range of fields, such as photographic history, with the minutiae of his observations and overheard conversations. The book captures the CT suite in transition, with a writing style that is simultaneously dry/uncluttered, and filled with rich description and metaphor.

pneumatic tubes in literature 3

Adam Walker describes his job one summer as a page at Butler Library on the Columbia campus in New York:

"Shelving expeditions eat up approximately half your day. The other half is spent sitting behind a small desk on one of the upper floors, waiting for a pneumatic tube to come flying up through the intestines of the building with a withdrawal slip commanding you to retrieve this or that book for the student or professor who has just asked for it below. The pneumatic tube makes a distinctive, clattering noise as it speeds upwards towards its destination, and you can hear it from the moment it begins its ascent. The stacks are distributed among several floors, and since you are just one of several pages sitting at desks on those several floors, you don't know if the pneumatic tube with the withdrawal slip rolled up inside it is headed for you or one of your colleagues. You don't find out until the last second, but if it is indeed meant for you, the metallic cylinder comes bursting out of an opening in the wall behind you and lands in the box with a propulsive thud, which instantly triggers a mechanism that turns on the forty or fifty red lightbulbs that line the ceiling from one end of the floor to the other. The lights are essential, for it often happens that you are away from your desk when the tube arrives, in the process of searching for another book, and when you see the lights go on you are alerted to the fact that a new order has just come in. If you are not away from your desk, you pull the withdrawal slip out of the tube, go off to find the book or books that are wanted, return to your desk, tuck the withdrawal slops into the books (making sure that the top portion is sticking out a couple of inches), load the books into the dumbwaiter in the wall behind your desk, and push the button for the second floor. To top off the operation, you return the empty tube by squeezing it into a little hole in the wall. You hear a pleasant whoosh as the cylinder is sucked into the vacuum, and more often than not you will go on standing there for a moment, following the sound of the clattering missile as it plunges through the pipe on its way downstairs. Then you return to your desk. You settle into your chair. You sit and wait for the next order"

From Invisible by Paul Auster, p103 - 104
(ear-marked by Thomas)

pneumatic tubes in literature 2

"It was over a draughtsman's drawing that my parents met. My mother was sitting across from him on a train. He had a drawing tablet open across his bony knees and she praised his work. Avery sat up in their bed below deck, very straight, and jostled against Jean as if they were in a railway compartment. '... Thank you,' said my father, 'though I must tell you, it's not the human circulatory systm, it's a high pressure vacuum engine. Though perhaps,' he added politely, 'it seems like a heart when viewed upside down.' He turned the drawing around and looked. 'Yes, I see,' he said. 'And now so do I,' said my mother. 'It's beautiful,' she added. 'Yes,' said my father, 'a well-designed engine is a thing of exceptional beauty.' My mother reports that he examined her more closely, searched her face. 'Well, yes,' said my mother, 'but what I mean is the drawing itself, the pressures and flow of the pencil.' 'Ah,' said my father, blushing. 'Thank you.'"
From The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels