toronto tubes

I spent a three weeks in Toronto recently, and stayed on the 36th floor of a downtown apartment building. It felt high, really high considering I had been living in the Netherlands for so long now. I had to put my garbage down a chute and spent hours of my trip waiting for and riding elevators. It got me thinking about pneumatic tube systems though, and how they traverse vertical distances so efficiently, more efficiently it feels than people or garbage.

It reminded me too of the article "That time Toronto had a system of Pneumatic Mail Tubes", which describes the revolution that the pneumatic tube systems built in the 1930s brought to communication between the city's newspaper, the Toronto Star, and the city hall. The system was a collaboration between the rail, telecommunication and newspaper heavyweights of Canada. Chris Bateman, author of the article in BlogTO, writes that:

In a rare show of co-operation in 1928, Canadian Pacific and Canadian Nation Railways laid what would become the foundation of the Toronto Star and Telegram system by running an elaborate 4,500-metre pneumatic tube network from their respective transmitting offices - at Yonge and Melinda and Bay and Temperance - down Bay to Postal Station A at Union Station. A small spur connected to the mail room at the Royal York Hotel ... Manholes every 300 feet down Bay provided access to the 2 1/4-inch copper tubes - which were laid on a concrete foundation and encased in creosoted wood - in case a canister became stuck.

Two years later, the Star and Telegram joined the pneumatic mail system, installing two sets of pipe in parallel down Bay Street. At its extent, the system included 7 properties, though there was no central exchange and most were only connected to one other place. It's not clear when the pneumatic tubes fell into disuse. The Royal York still has the transparent pipes of its internal system on display but, sadly, its staff have found more convenient (though infinitely less exciting) ways of getting messages through the giant old building." 

I always seem to come across or remember these articles when it is too late and I write this now from back home in Maastricht, trying to remember if I saw any manholes on the street which would have provided access to those tubes. Probably not, I was too busy looking skyward, in awe of all those tall buildings.

Photo: my own

beautiful books

My Modern Met posted an entry recently about "book surgeon" Brian Dettmer, and his literary scultpures made from encyclopedias, medical journals, illustration books and dictionaries. These two just seemed worth sharing here ...

Thanks Pamela for sharing this with me!

at the touch of a pneumatic button

Past futurists have often imagined pneumatic tubes as features of their technological horizon. The Smithsonian Magazine recently published a Boston Globe article, written by Thomas Anderson on December 24, 1900 that imagined what Boston would look like in the year 2000.

Of course there were pneumatic tubes, but these would be no simple letter carrying networks. Pneumatics would have the multi-functionality needed to ease many tasks of daily living:

"The pneumatic tube service, by the way, will have reached its perfection long before the first half of the new century has flown. It will have become a most important factor in the domestic life of the people which also will have undergone great changes. Through such tubes a householder will undoubtedly receive his letters, his readymade lunches, his laundry, his morning and evening paper, and even the things he may require from the department store, which will furnish at the touch of a button any essential solid or liquid that can be named. By means of his electro-pneumatic switchboard, with which all well regulated houses will be equipped, he may sit in his comfortable arm chair and
enjoy either the minister’s sermon or the latest opera in the new Symphony hall
of the vintage of 1960".

The postal system itself, was to be rather more complex than the turn of the century systems transporting letters between postboxes and postoffices:

"The system of pneumatic transmission of mail already introduced is undoubtedly
to have an extensive development, and I have little doubt that the time will
come when mail will be sent from the central or branch post office through such
tubes directly to the house or office of the citizen who cares to pay for the
cost of such service... I do not anticipate that the cheapening and extension of
the telegraph or telephone service is going to adversely affect the number of
letters written and mailed in the future. On the contrary, the cheapening and
improvement of the postal service may operate as a factor against the growth of
the other service"

Sadly it seems that the telephone service did much to "adversely affect" letter writing, at least in its material form. The internet affects not only how we communicate with each other, but also the way we read newspapers, do our shopping and all manner of other tasks, that in Thomas Anderson's eyes would, in our retro future, be easily undertaken at the touch of a pneumatic tube button.
Image from the Smithsonian Magazine.

experiments in bacterial communication

Another post not strictly about pneumatic transportation, but on a topic that is closely (or perhaps more tangentially) related if we think of the ways in which pathological samples are networked around a hospital as a form of communication.

This is a piece of embroidery by Anna Dumitriu. Anna is interested in the borderlines between art and science, such as this example of bacterial communication, tracing the movement of bacterial cells on pieces of linen and lace. She is the director of the Institute of Unnecessary Research and is an artist in residence on the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project at Oxford University. Her exhibition of these exquisite embroideries opened on Saturday at R-Space, in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. The exhibition also includes other microbiological crafts such as:

"A large-scale collaborative crochet based on the bacteria from the artist’s own bed, an indigo blue coloured patchwork stained with MRSA bacteria grown on chromogenic agar and patterned with clinical antibiotics and other tools in the research and treatment of this disease, [and] a Whitework embroidered lab coat patterned with images of bacteria and moulds found on it"

Despite my interest in science, medicine, art and craft, I have not always been a fan of bioart, finding many works disengaging. This exhibition caught my eye however, not only for its melding of embroidery and microbiology (see my fascination with this in a previous post here and here), but also because of the beauty of each piece, and the curiosity the artist invokes in the viewer.

If you miss the exhibition you can always settle for the catalogue, available from Blurb.

Images from The Normal Flora Project.

rohrpost easter

Over Easter my husband and I went to Berlin, home of one of the largest pneumatic dispatch systems (rohrpost) in the world. We found evidence of this history in the Museum für Kommunikation Berlin, a rather quirky place, with a dark little basement crypt dedicated to their treasures, including the capsules below (with more photographs soon).

I looked everywhere for evidence of the old system on the streets or in buildings but could not find it. Does anyone know were to find reminants of the old postal pneumatic tube systems in Berlin, Paris or any other city? Perhaps we could have found some signs if we had taken a tour run by the Berliner Unterwelten E.V: Society for exploration and documentation of subterranean architecture ...

of mauve ribbons, white wax and petit bleus

In a retelling of his romantic childhood fascination with Gilberte (daughter of the previously mentioned Monsieur Swann) Marcel Proust very beautifully unveils the hidden markings, the social relations, the meanings and the hope bound up in pneumatic correspondence:

"Another time, still preoccupied by the desire to hear La Berma in a classical play, I had asked her [Gilberte] if she happened to own a little book in which Bergotte talked about Racine, and which one could no longer find. She had asked me to remind her of its exact title and that evening I had addressed an express letter to her, writing on the envelope that name, Gilberte Swann, which I had so often copied out in my notebooks. The next day she brought me a packet tied up in mauve ribbons and sealed with white wax, containing the little book, a copy of which she had asked for someone to locate for her. 'You see? It really is the one you asked for,' she said, taking from her muff the letter I had sent her. But on the address of this pneumatique¹ - which, only yesterday, was nothing, was merely a petit bleu which I had written, and which, now that a telegraph boy had delivered it to Gilberte's concierge and a servant had carried it to her room, had become this priceless thing, one of the petits bleus she had received that day - it was hard for me to recognize the insignificant, solitary lines of my handwriting under the printed circles apposed to it by the post office, under the inscriptions added in pencil by one of the telegraph messangers, signs of actual realization, stamps from the outside world, violet bands symbolizing life, which for the first time came to espuse, sustain, uplift, delight my dream" (The Way by Swann's, Penguin edition translated by Lydia Davis, p406).

1. pneumatique: express letter sent by pneumatic tube. This delivery system existed in Paris as late as the 1970s or 1980s; as the telephone system was very slow to develop, casual appointments were made and messages transmitted by pneumatique, also known as a petit bleu, literrally 'little blue'. (The Way by Swann's, Penguin edition translated by Lydia Davis, p446).

Image from active social plastic.

more wonderful maps!

from the Internet Archive ...

Images from Pneumatic Tube Service Report of the Postmaster-General

tubes for drella

This week I went to see a great dance performance by Scapino Ballet called Songs for Drella, which was a tribute to Andy Warhol. The reason I mention this is because of the presumedly little known fact that Warhol was a fan of pneumatic tube systems.

A lover of "good plain American" food, who believed that "progress is very important and exciting in everything except food", Andy Warhol once helped design a restaurant which served homely comfort food (i.e. re-heated frozen dinners). Called the "Andy-Mat", the restaurant (which never eventuated), was going to include a system where customers' orders would be sent to the kitchen via pneumatic tube.

This seems a rather progressive way of ordering un-progressive food! The un-realised system sounds like a precursor to the digital hand-held ordering machines now used regularly by waitresses.

Photo and quotes from "Restaurant-ing through history" blog of Warhol and his partners, [standing L to R] architect Araldo Cossutta, developer Geoffrey Leeds, and financier C. Cheever Hardwick III.

another map

Paris, 1907

Another map from City Planning.

pneumatic tube classic of the week 4

Pneumatic tube classic and love letter classic from the romantic adventures of Antoine Doinel ... (see my previous post about the pneumatic tube scene).

Image of Baisers Volés from LYW's Flikr photostream.

pneumatic spy gadgets

What could be more intriguing that a pneumatic tube network in the headquarters of a spy agency!

The CIA received a bit of press recently for 'going public' with images of spy gadgets from their museum collection (even though these images had been on their flikr page for years).

This particular image is of an amber-coloured carrier which traversed one of the four pneumatic tube systems installed in the late 1950s by the Lamson Corporation (other systems had red, green or metal carriers). The system wound its way through all seven floors of the old CIA building, with 150 receiving and dispatching stations.

In keeping with my interest in all of the tinkering that goes with these systems, I was intrigued to learn that "in order to operate and maintain the pneumatic-tube system, the Agency had to recruit a staff from the Washington Post Office and the Washington Navy Yard".

And like so many pneumatic tube systems, this spy network now remains the stuff of history and museum artefact. Shut down in 1989, the system required too much space, had become too expensive to maintain and was considered redundant in light of email.

Image from CIA's Flikr page, which received has achieved fame in WIRED magazine for being notoriously bad.