Tinkering tubes

It was just a just another day at the movies, and what drops into my lap but an unexpected pneumatic post delivery!

Actually, it wasn't just a normal day, it was the first time my son had been to the cinema. We chose a pretty low-key film, the summer 2021 Buurman en Buurman release, a selection of several 2020 episodes put together. The beautiful stop-motion series is one of my favourite kids series - I can watch these two Czech tinkerers make their amazing contraptions and solutions and mistakes over and over. 

In classic Buurman style, the episode in question (episode 9 in season 10: "Potrubní pošta") involved Pat and Mat (the tinkerers) solving a puzzle - this time how to share tools - only to create all sorts of mayhem in the solution with the answer being a wonderful, there-the-whole time ending: "A je to!".

The tube system is gorgeous, duct tape and all, and will be the envy of anyone contemplating their own home system.

Monica Meijer from Cinemagazine is another fan of the episode - she writes in her review:

Één van de leukste filmpjes is ‘Buizenpost’ waarin de modus operandi van de twee vrienden misschien wel op zijn toppunt is. De klussende buurmannen moeten om de haverklap bij elkaar langskomen voor het lenen van gereedschap en materiaal. Dat moet toch makkelijker kunnen? Het in de basis goede idee wordt echter door hun manier van denken om zeep geholpen, en terwijl aan het eind van het filmpje de oplossing zó voor de hand ligt, zien ze deze niet. Ach, eigenlijk maar goed ook: want door de kromme gedachtegang van Buurman & Buurman zijn we er in ieder geval van verzekerd dat de makers nog genoeg inspiratie hebben voor volgende filmpjes.

 

 

Image above used under creative commons from Wikipedia.

Pat & Mat adventures - 009 - Tube post from Rakso 98 Lite on Vimeo.

pneumatic tube also has problems

Currently my university is undergoing a cyber attack, and all email systems are down. It makes me wonder if this would happen if we corresponded by pneumatic tube rather than digitally. But of course pneumatic tube systems are not infallible alternatives. They also get hacked, broken into, breakdown and just well, get stuck.

This was the cause of news recently in the Montreal Gazette, because of the delays in patient care that blockages (due for example to spillages in the tube) and electrical faults were causing. The solution is more preventive maintenance. Hopefully my university can find a solution to their own communication problem they are having this Christmas - as much as we all complain about email it might be difficult to send all our correspondence by hand instead.

Image from envac.

dead letter office

Quick follow-up on my last blogpost - Richard Griffen offers a much more personal review of The Post, in the Wicked Local:

When I was a child, that Post was the largest newspaper in New England, and it was also where my father worked. Newspapers were central to our world.

After my freshman year in college, I had a summer job as a copy boy at another paper, The Boston Globe. Along with one or two other young men, I stood by a pneumatic tube in the newsroom, waiting to send typewritten pages upstairs to the composing room.

In this digital age, of course, such jobs no longer exist. But they did in 1971, and in “The Post,” Spielberg shows us a world of pneumatic tubes and metallic type, when people counted on papers for the latest news.

One of my summer jobs was typing letters on an electronic typewriter in my dad's architectural office. I used the keyboard skills taught to me in my typewriter classes in my catholic all-girls' highschool, learning QWERTY and space bars and what to do with mistakes. I can still hear in my ears Mrs Skippington's singsong voice orchestrating us girls in synchronised typing. I guess that job doesn't exist these days either.

Photo of a hospital's "Typewriter Graveyard" from Jonathan Haeber's Flickr page, used under the creative commons lisence.

zondag post

Zondag, some years ago ...

Thank you Annelies, for the clipping!

"Een bijzonder toestel.". "Algemeen Handelsblad". Amsterdam, 14-03-1886. Geraadpleegd op Delpher op 25-11-2015, http://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010146876:mpeg21:a0070

pneumatic postal kit

Unlike the telegraph of the past and the SMS of the present, pneumatic post maintained its material form throughout its journey. This meant that the senders' instant messages could be scented with perfume, the receiver able to read correspondence handwritten and hand-drawn. The letter's journey was traceable through stamps and other markings.

Pneumatic tube systems are important for moving objects which carry personal traces of the sender, whether this be a tissue sample for pathological analysis or a handwritten letter. Letter writing has now become more of a craft rather than the everyday activity it once was. While the days of sending scented instant messages under our city streets have disappeared, I may have just found a lovely alternative from the Letter Writers Alliance: their Pneumatic Post kit.

From the website:

Remember the joy of going to the drive-through at the bank and popping that deposit tube into the pneumatic pipe? Bring back that sense of wonder with our Pneumatic Post. This kit brings back the Victorian pneumatic tube system and updates it for today. A great way to add an extra special bit of magic to a letter. We give you everything in the kit to send the Tube back and forth, even the postage for the first mailing! Write your message, roll it up, and pop it in the Pneumatic Tube. You can even add extra treats in the tube to add an extra ray of sunshine for your awesome correspondent.

Unfortunately the kit is not for international members (presumably non-US members). International letter writers however might want to search elsewhere on the site for other correspondence kits that take their fancy. Like this gorgeous Telegram Stationary for example.

The mission of the Letter Writing Alliance is as follows:

In this era of instantaneous communication, a handwritten letter is a rare and wondrous item. The Letter Writers Alliance is dedicated to preserving this art form; neither long lines, nor late deliveries, nor increasing postal rates will keep us from our mission.

Image from the Letter Writing Alliance website, used with permission.

sensory map of an imaginary pneumatic tube system

I have been wondering what a map of an imaginary pneumatic tube system, for a fantastical city of the past, present or future might look like ... or smell like ... or taste like ... or sound like ... For why should maps be restricted to beautiful lines and pictures?

I am inspired by the taste map of the London underground, created by James Wannerton of Blackpool in the UK. Wannerton has synaesthesia, a condition which means that the senses become intermingled in interesting and sometimes disturbing ways. For Wannerton, it means that he can taste words. His map is filled with tube stops that he has tasted, from cold Horlicks and crisp sandwiches to coal dust and burned rubber. What would pneumatic tube stops taste like? In Christchurch, where pneumatic tubes transport burgers and fries from the kitchen to hungry diners, they might be rather tasty. In the hospital it might be a bit different! Imagine a network that transported all different kinds of materials at the same time: burgers through one line, letters through another.

I am inspired too by Kate McLean's smell maps. In Paris, letters sent by pneumatic tube could be scented by perfume, the scent lingering in the little capsules. On Roosevelt Island however, it is garbage which moves through the tubes, leaving a lot less pleasant smell. Further inspiration can be found in the many sound maps online. Sounds could be recorded of landing and take-off, or rumbling journeys and expressions of delight or dismay at the contents of capsules, such as those that I have uploaded onto SoundCloud.

I am having lots of fun imagining all the sensory stops on my fantastical map. What would your imaginary pneumatic map sound, smell, feel, taste and look like?

For more about pneumatic tube maps, see my series of blogposts in 2010 and 2011.

post-postal conference

I have been to interesting conference destinations before, but I think that the Post and Tele Museum in Copenhagen takes the cake. How often do you get to go down slides with your fellow delegates, in a room filled with giant postage stamps? Or see a pneumatic tube system in action!? (thanks Andreas)

I am speaking about the New Directions in the History of Infrastructure conference, that took place in the postal museum last month, hosted by Andreas Marklund and Mogens Rudiger. It was the kind of conference where your museum tour guide asks "who here collects stamps?" and a good proportion of the attendees raise their hands.

Over two and a half days, about 20 or so scholars interested in histories of infrastructure met to discuss their latest research. We heard about people smuggling, eavesdropping, sabotage, tinkering and past futures, in amongst talks on railways, the telegraph, metro systems, logistics, bicycle infrastructure and other large scale infrastructure projects. You can read the conference abstract here and see the program here.

It was one of those incredibly inspiring meetings where everyone was open to exchanging ideas during talks, lunches, dinners and coffees. I received good feedback from my talk and found out about even more wonderful uses of pneumatic tubes. As one of the only non-historians in the audience, I was warmly welcomed and loved learning more about the historical approach. I hope to keep in touch with many of the fascinating researchers I met during this workshop.

Images my own, from inside and on top of the Post and Tele Museum, Copenhagen.

Dreyfus bleus

For some years now my friend Patrice and I have been reading In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. It is a book club of two, with many wonderful evenings spent together, sometimes talking of the book, walking in the botanical gardens, in wine bars or more recently chatting on Skype. At the moment we are reading The Guermantes Way, the third volume. It is here that the narrator becomes immersed in dinner parties and afternoon teas where much talk is of the Dreyfus Affair.

Alfred Dreyfus was a young Jewish artillery officer in the French Army who, in December 1984, was convicted of treason, accused of spying for the Germans. In the following days he was publicly degraded, his medals stripped, his sword broken, spat on by the crowd. After years exiled in prison in a tiny island in the Atlantic, it was to be a pneumatique telegramme, a petit bleu, which would begin a cascade of events leading to the release of this innocent man.

One day in 1986, a petit-bleu, torn-up and never sent, was found in the contents of a rubbish bin in the Germany military post in Paris. When pieced together (see above) the message was revealed, implicating another French officer in the offences attributed to Dreyfus. It took another 10 years before Dreyfus was restored to commission and his innocence publicly declared in the same place where he had been previously dishonoured.

It seems sadly ironic that a torn-up telegramme led to the release of Dreyfus, considering that it was torn-up documents that led to his conviction (where bizarrely the lack of correspondence between Dreyfus' writing and that of the document was proof of "self-forgery"). This was a very important moment in French history, a topic of much Paris salon repartee, and by the end of the 19th century a pre-occupation of many in the country, with camps divided. Indeed some argue that we are still in the midst of Dreyfus Affairs, where national panic takes false prisoners.

Information for this blogpost largely sourced from Trial of the Century: Revisiting the Dreyfus Affair by Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker (September 28, 2009).

Image from Europeana

cybernetic dreams and future archeologies

In July this year I will be joining other anthropologists in Tallinn, Estonia, to imagine infrastructures of the past, present and future. I am very excited that my paper on pneumatic tubes was accepted for the panel Infrastructure and imagination: Anthropocene landscapes, urban deep-ecology, cybernetic dreams and future-archeologies, at the 13th European Association of Social Anthropologists Biennial Conference.

Juan Rojas Meyer and Roger Sansi, both in London, are organising the panel which will explore infrastructures as generative sites of ethnographic inquiry, and their potential to motivate the imagination. Topics of papers in the panel sound fascinating and include water supply in Africa and Nepal, waste treatment in Athens, the TransAdriatic Pipeline and clouds. Here is my abstract:

Pneumatic tubes: George Jetson used them to get to work, Antoine Doinel to send a love letter, and the Ministry of Truth to deliver history needing rewriting. These hidden labyrinths of pipes which transport matter by vacuum not only exist in the dreams of cartoonists, filmmakers and science fiction writers, but also engineers of the technological past, present and future. Once traversing the undergrounds of cities for postal delivery or depositing orders on the stock exchange, pneumatic tube networks are nowadays ever increasingly built into the walls, ceilings and basements of hospitals, banks and supermarkets. For despite digitisation, objects still need to be moved from one place to another. Counter intuitively, unlike many technologies of the past, pneumatic tube infrastructures have both changed very little over time and are being used in more contexts than ever before. With this paper I take session participants on a short subterranean tour of the intertwined past, present and future of pneumatic tubes. I examine the materials of this sociotechnical system; plastic capsules, brass buttons and air through which things pass. I look at bodily practices entailed in the manufacture, architectural design, everyday use and repair of the technology, including the adjustments which go to making it work. In Stoic philosophy, pneuma is "breath of life", the active and creative presence in matter. A study of pneuma-tic systems leads to bigger questions of how to consider the "pneumatic qualities" of infrastructures, the creativity that breathes life into the material world we live in.

Image of Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Tallinn, Estonia from Wikipedia Commons.
See also: How to send Estonian vodka through the pneumatic internet, in Wired Magazine.

in the CIA set

Installing pneumatic tubes in film sets would have to be one of the more glamorous commissions for pneumatic tube suppliers. Thanks to a recent comment on this blog I found out that Scorsese isn't the only filmmaker to have demanded such close attention to detail on his set, as to install pneumatic tubes. Ben Affleck was also a stickler for detail when making his film Argo. The same vendor who supplied tubes for Wolf of Wall Street also supplied tubes for Argo, so that the filmmakers could replicate the CIA offices of the 1970s.

I've written in a previous post about the CIA pneumatic post system. Affleck used the L.A. Times building to film the CIA scenes, and as InfidelWorld reports, the use of "ancient technology" such as pneumatic tubes helped to set a tone of decline and uncertainty. Argo production designer Sharon Seymour tells Variety that her and her team went to some effort to track down old typewriters, computers, telephones and TV sets for the CIA office scenes, as well as build the pneumatic tubes, "to make audiences think about how communications have changed".

The question now remains: will the tubes be a lucky charm at the Oscars another year round?

Images of the Argo set from Deadline, Untapped Cities and image of a CIA pneumatic capsule from CIA's Flikr page.

pneumatic tubes vs human based transport

Something which often goes unsaid in much writing about the wonders of pneumatic tube technology, is that they are used in many places to replace staff. Or, as described in one Indian press release, "human based transport" (or HBT, as it is abbreviated to). There have been a few articles from India that I have come across describing how pneumatic tubes can replace (or displace) work performed by individuals such as ward boys, orderlies, patients' attendants and relatives. For example, Healthcare Express reports some of the problems of HBT:

1. Delays: "Hospital's staff carrying the materials may get diverted to a corner for a quick cigarette or a bidi or even choose to have a quick cup of tea with his or her friends - not realising the critical life saving time being wasted".
2. Mistakes: "During the physical carrying of test tube samples, the carrier staff member suddenly trips over and the samples/materials fall off and break" (again loosing critical life saving time). Also, samples and materials may become mixed up, in this "conventional mechanism", which may have grave consequences.
3. Theft: "A universal problem, invariably theft is very common during transportation of drugs, instruments and other materials".
4. Exposure: Confidential and classified materials could be exposed to "unwanted personnel".
5. Biohazard: Carrying a sample involves risk of exposure and cross-infections
6. Personnel: "over-hiring of staff etc"
7. Energy: "Use of dumb waiters and elevators for running such errands causes high consumption of energy".

In the Hindu Business Line, readers are asked to imagine the following possibilities:

Situation A: Someone in your family is admitted in hospital. The patient obviously will need an attendant by his/her side to buy the medicine prescribed (if not anything else) from the pharmacy located (invariably) within the premises. Imagine climbing the stairs or waiting for the lift every time a prescription is issued. While this gives the attendant some respite from the confines of the room, from being near the patient all the time, it may also involve a lot of running around. 

Situation B: The patient has to be moved to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU)/Operation theatre. Imagine the time that one needs to wait before the stretcher or wheel chair is brought in to help move the patient. As seconds tick, the attendant's blood pressure tends to rise. If only technology can help solve such issues….

Technology is there to the rescue - pneumatic tubes obviously. Each of the two articles above propose pneumatic tube technology as the solution to these human transport based dilemmas. At Kovai Medical Centre and Hospital, pneumatic tubes are reported in the Hindu Business Line to have led to a much quieter hospital: “With the installation of the PTS, the working atmosphere at the pharmacy and laboratory has become strangely silent since the number of encounters by staff in service areas and conversation with patients' assistants have vanished,” says the hospital president. The pneumatic tube system now makes around 600 transportations a day, replacing the trips made by ward boys/girls. The tube system in Kovai is also viewed as correcting human errors made with mixing-up samples, and most importantly, preventing cross-infection, as, according to the hospital president, "the patient assistants or ward staff need not move in and out of the patient area in their street shoes,”. The final line of the Hindu Business Line article alludes to where all of these human based transporters (called the unskilled workforce) may potentially be deployed: in distributing linen and instrumentation sets at the nursing station.

Image of Nigel Rapport's beautiful ethnography of hospital porters, Of Orderlies and Men.

cabaret capsules

In an extravagant dancehall in Berlin, amidst water features, dance floors and big bands, it was once possible to send notes and gifts (there was a menu of 135 gifts you could send) to fellow revellers by pneumatic post. Somewhat more romantic than the pneumatic delivery of burgers and chips that I wrote about last week, the Resi Rohrpost seems to have been the making of one or two liaisons, fuelled by German wines and jazz.

In response to a recent blogpost in Cabaret Berlin about The Resi, a series of war veterans comment about their fond memories of the dancehall and their pneumatic encounters. One Army Lieutenant exchanged messages in 1956 which he still had in his possession - notes from table 448 to table 482 for example, between the Lieutenant and Blue Color, whom he danced with that night. Another visitor to the dancehall met a "beautiful German lady" who had sent him a note by the tube asking him to rescue her from a blind date.

Coincidentally I happened to be reading Ian McEwan's book The Innocent when I read this blogpost, which has a passage where the protagonist visits a nightclub in Berlin with other British servicemen. There is a wonderful scene which takes place in what I now realise is The Resi. Leonard has descended with a few others via a small lift into the then dark bar, with its grand unlit chandeliers and gilt-framed mirrors. Over Russian champagne, the story's protagonist reads a pamphlet attached to the menu, written in "clumsy print that swayed and danced". The pamphlet welcomed visitors to the Ballhouse of technical wonders, with "Modern Table-Phone-System" and "Pneumatic-Table-Mail-Service", posting "every night thousands of letters or little presents from one visitor to another" (pp 33-34). Soon Leonard receives a message of his own (pp35 -36):

As the mermaid shimmered to the front of the band and the cheers rung out there was a harsh rattling at their table as a canister shot down the tube and smacked against the brass fixture and lodge there. They stared at it and no one moved. 

Then Glass picked it up and unscrewed the top. He took out a folded piece of paper and spread it out on the table. 'My God, ' he shouted, 'Leonard, it's for you.' 

For one confused moment he thought it might be from his mother. He was owed a letter from England. And it was late, he thought, he hadn't said where he was going to be. 

The three of them were leaning over the note. Their heads were blocking out the light. Russel read it aloud. 'An den jungen Mann mit der Blume in Haar.' To the young man with the flower in his hair. 'Mein Schoner, I have been watching you from my table. I would like it if you come and asked me to dance. But if you can't do this, I would be so happy if you would turn and smile in my direction. I am sorry to interfere, yours, table number 89'.

Romance blossoms between the woman at table 89, Maria, and Leonard - later on they return to The Resi and drink Sekt to toast their first meeting - Maria wants to sit apart and send messages through the pneumatic tube, but there are no vacant tables. They have a second bottle of Sekt.

Built in 1908, The Resi was in its heyday in the 1920s. The venue closed in 1939 but was recreated in 1951, rohrpoststation and all - it is this recreation that Leonard visited. Sadly the building was closed and demolished in 1978.

Image from Cabaret Berlin. See also a great postcard from The Resi on the Buispost site.

fairy deliveries by pneumatic post

NPR reported recently on one very cool dad who made a pneumatic tube transportation system for sending teeth to the tooth fairy. See the video here. I love that a second-hand iphone is used for the sending station. So many fun possibilities from this!

pneumatic tube factory tour part one: atmospheric beginnings

On the 13th June 2013 I was lucky enough to spend a whole day touring the Hörtig pneumatic tube factory in Bayreuth, Germany. I couldn't think of a better way to spend my holidays. I was like Charlie amongst the chocolate, eyes wide, glass elevators of plastic tubing all around me. This is how I got my golden ticket for the factory tour:

The first connection was made in a Thai restaurant in Exeter. The connection was between me, pneumatic tube enthusiast, and Christine, philosopher, sociologist and member of the Hörtig pneumatic tube family. While leaning over to dip my spring roll in sweet chilli sauce during a work dinner, I overheard my colleague Christine tell her neighbour about her family's business making and installing pneumatic tube systems. I almost dropped the spring roll. Many conversations ensued, and the seeds were planted for a factory visit ...

Exeter seems a perfect place for this story to begin, for it is the site of Brunel's pneumatic, or atmospheric railway. Inspired by Irish atmospheric railways, Brunel built a section of atmospheric rail between Exeter and Newton (Abbot) which lasted almost a year, from 1847 to 1848. Imagine buying one of the three shilling one dime tickets to board such a train!

Luckily there seem to have been windows, for this is one of the most beautiful sections of British rail, running along the coast between Starcross and Teignmouth. I travelled almost every day along this train line with my husband last year, as we commuted between Totnes and Exeter. Some days the sea would be roaring against the train windows, other days it was calm. It always changed colour. The water certainly caused havoc for maintaining seals in the vacuum in the atmospheric railway with the leather flaps eroded by salt.

The pneumatic train line is now long gone, although you can see sections of the track in Didcot Pathway, or visit the Atmospheric Railway Pub in Starcross. Or you can just take the magnificent, atmospheric, journey between Exeter and Totnes, and imagine the railway as it was, for yourself.

Image of a section of the South Devon atmospheric railway from Wikipedia, and image of Teignmouth sea wall from Barry Lewis' Flikr photostream.

le bruit de choc

Paris in the 1890s, and a tubiste working in the Poste Pneumatique pulls a lever, cranks a steel door, exchanges cylinders and closes the door again. Sweat forms on his brow as he turns the wheel to create a vacuum and apply compressed air. He pauses to ring the bell so the next station knows of the coming delivery. A tubiste down the line rings his bell when he hears le bruit de choc as the tube arrives at his station.

This section of text, adapted from Molly Wright Steenson's Cabinet article, is filled with sound. The soundscapes of these brass-age pneumatic systems evoke the work involved in sending pneumatic missives underneath the city. These historic sonic delights are however considered pollution in many modern day hospitals, with an increasing call to 'turn the sound down' in clinical work spaces.
  
Swisslog have responded to this drive with their patent-pending Whisper Receiving System, which minimises noise associated with pneumatic transportation. Recently installed in the positively named Le Bonheur Hospital in America, the system is said to enable employees to concentrate better on the patient care requirements of the hospital. I wonder how the tubistes were ever able to get their work done with all of that cranking, clanging and bell ringing!

Image from Scott Kostolni's Flikrstream.

DIY pneumatic tube system

Last year I reported on some evidence of vacuumpunk, as video bloggers document their DIY pneumatic tube systems. Looks like its a movement!



This and other videos can be found here, on the Hallo Spencer Fanblog.