the underwater tunnels

When travelling to Australia recently, Chris Gray from West Yorkshire, UK, was feeling homesick, and wanted to just "nip home". Inspired by Harry Beck's London map, he invented a global Underground network, which would enable travellers to move between countries, and traverse great bodies of water by zooming through tunnels.

This is not a new idea. Connecting countries, and indeed the world, by underwater tunnels has fascinated science fiction writers and engineers for centuries. Jules Verne wrote about underwater travel and underwater pneumatic tube systems can be found in the world of Futurama.

 

Less fictional, there is of course the Channel Tunnel, now star of a new TV series, The Tunnel. And more recently opened, is the much awaited and controversial Bosphorus Tunnel, connecting Asia and Europe. Crossing the Atlantic though has proved more difficult. In the Daily Mail report on Gray's fantastical global network, engineer Robert Benaim suggests that one solution to the perplexing puzzle of how to connect America and Europe, may be a floating pneumatic tube, similar to Elon Musk's Hyperloop. This sounds very similar to Futurama's underwater system, and those of Verne's novels. Once again, fiction and real-life blurs, in the wonderful world of pneumatic tubes.

Image 1 my own, under the Bosphorus one month after tunnel opens in Istanbul, December 2013 

Image 2 from Futurama

london tubes

I am going to London in April. After four months now of living in England I am itching to visit the nation's capital, my mouth watering already for London restaurant meals and the coffee I hear some Melbourne baristas are brewing in Antipodean cafes, as well as the galleries, the museums etc etc. Oh yes, and the excellent conference I am attending on genetics!

Think London and you think underground. Or 'the tube'. The iconically represented networked system of transportation is now synonymous with the city. In Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett describes the London Underground as both an artery and a vein, transforming the social condition of Londoners by allowing them to live further outside the city centre, facilitating mass consumption, and supposedly creating a more "mixed" city.

It is because of the human blood like flows of people however that Sennett proposes that the city was not mixed but rather that human contact between the classes was limited. During the day, the arteries took people below ground into the heart of the city, creating density by daylight, while at night the subterranean channels emptied the masses from the centre, leaving a sparsely populated city.

Tubes and vessels, pipes and lungs: the circulatory system and respiratory system are often used to describe urban flows of transportation, communication and other forms of movement. What does it mean to use these medical metaphors? Particularly in contexts such as hospitals, if we want to describe pneumatic tube systems in this way, where vessles, arterioles, air sacs and tracheas take on a particular clinical relevance? The metaphors we use tell us something about norms, attitudes, values and so forth, and this is something I have previously explored, and will continue to explore, when thinking about pneumatic tubes.

Image from Roger Wollstadt's Flikr photostream.

more wonderful maps!

from the Internet Archive ...

Images from Pneumatic Tube Service Report of the Postmaster-General

another map

Paris, 1907

Another map from City Planning.

pneumatic tube map of the week 10

Paris 1971

Map of the Parisian post network from compulink. As this is the last "map of the week" I will do for a while, also wanted to share this link about map-making that Andy sent me, for those who are interested: http://www.goughmap.org/project-team

pneumatic tube map of the week 9

Google Map

Pneumatic tube map of various pneumatic tube systems and other important pneumatic tube locations located in Europe and North America from The Full Wiki.

pneumatic post map of the week 8

Rohrpost Berlin 1928

Image from Rice University Rohrpost site.

pneumatic tube map of the week 7

Rohrpost Reichsbank 1927-28

Map from Wikipedia.

pneumatic tube map of the week 6

Postage stamp, France

See here for another great postage stamp tube map. And for a post about this particular postage, on a good map blog, visit MapMarks.

Stamp image from Motor Filatelisten Nederlands.

pneumatic tube map of the week 5

Rohrpost Berlin 1873

Image from Wikipedia.

pneumatic tube map of the week 4

Rohrpost Berlin 1945

From Wikipedia via Synccity blog

pneumatic tube map of the week 3

Rohrpost Berlin 1885

Map from Wikipedia via Synccity