Moving packages

Yesterday I went to a seminar organised at my university (Maastricht University) by the Department of Knowledge Engineering, to celebrate 25 years of their work on artificial intelligence. One of the presenters Andreas Weigend was a former scientist at Amazon, the digital company now gone physical.

While everyone is talking about the innovations of Amazon at the moment, an article in The Atlantic argues that we should be looking at an earlier company, Sears, as one of the significant forerunners of the Amazon revolution.

Sears started as a mailing company, with watches, and quickly grew. To manage it's mail order business it built "massive warehouses, like its central facility in Chicago, in which messages to various departments and assembly workers were sent through pneumatic tubes".

The logistics of such organisations are fascinating as they grow and evolve with the times, the materiality of the movement of objects no less important now, despite email and other digital messages.

Image of Sears Roebuck & Company Mail Order Plant basement, Section H of the pneumatic tube network, Chicago, from Library of Congress.

seidenstrasse

While fascinating technologies such as Hyperface, Adam Harvey's countersurveillance project, are making recent news, another project from the Chaos Community Congress from a previous year may also be of interest to Rohrpost-Nerds.

The 303C in 2013 saw the installation of the Seidenstrasse, the congress pneumatic tube system. Inspired by the OCTO installation at the 2013 transmediale festival, which I wrote about here, the Seidenstrasse was installed in the main congress building, using 2 kilometers of tubing. In the lead up to the event, participants were instructed as follows:

Without YOUR capsules Seidenstrasse cannot work – bring one, two, many! Lighting is mandatory, since it makes debugging much easier in case a capsule gets stuck. The possibilities range from capsules made from plastic bottles (cheap and simple) to 3D printed or encrypted capsules. Old vacuum cleaners, leaf blowers and the like are also welcome – please remember to build some kind of noise isolation if you bring a device for blowing or vacuuming ...

For the whole thing to be fun, creative hacker solutions and wild love of experimentation are needed. Some hackerspaces, including Chaos inKL. in Kaiserslautern, Raumfahrtagentur in Berlin, or the protolab in Kleinmachnow are already hacking and making. There are still a lot of unsolved problems left though, waiting for a smart hack: For example solutions for crossing fire emergency doors, which can not be blocked by pipes. The capsules could at these places e.g. fly through the air and be vacuumed in again, or be transported by human or robotic messengers.

Installations for (semi) automatic capsule routing would be rad, or installation details for the switching nodes, or solutions for hanging the pipes at the ceiling, or concepts for Onion Routing, Hidden Servides and so on. Also still missing are capsule counters for network traffic analysis (for the SOC report on day 4).

For this we hope for broad participation by the Chaos family and hacker spaces. You have always wanted a pneumatic post system between the rooms of your space, right? :-)

If anyone who reads this post was at the congress and even sent off a capsule, I would love to hear what it was like!

You can read more about the Silk Road experiment on the Chaos Computer Club website here.

Thanks very much to Thomas for telling me about Hyperface, and Stefan for sending me the links for the Seidenstrasse.

Stefan also sent me a link to a German blogpost by Leitmedium about the Rohrpost exhibit in the communications museum in Berlin, which German speakers and readers may be interested in. You can read it here.


Image used under the Creative Commons licence from Robert Anders' Flikr photostream.

running outdoors

Long Branch Mike has alerted me to another amazing pneumatic tube system - the one running underneath Indiana University Health's People Mover, which connects several hospitals in Indianapolis.

These outdoor hospital tubes are pretty impressive - they remind me of riding the monorail to Disneyland as a kid. The gaps in the rails are designed to prevent the collection of snow. Although as Mike wonders, how do they keep the tubes from freezing in the winter? Must investigate.

Image by Dina Wakulchik from Indianapolis, Indiana, USA - Clarian Health Partners People Mover, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5193131.

straight to perfumery

I saw a trailer for the movie Brooklyn the other day and thought I glimpsed a gorgeous set of brass pneumatic tubes in the department store where the main character is working. I am off to the movies with friends on Wednesday to check! And let me know if you have seen any too. In the meantime, here are some tubes in the perfumery department of the old Myer in Melbourne to enjoy.

Image from WeekendNotes, as seen at Myer Mural Hall open day.

utopian superbuildings

The superhospital is upon us. No, not a hospital for superheroes, nor one that heals lesions with spells like St Mungos, but rather a big big hospital, stretching across and up, networked with dense layers of infrastructure.

Montreal has been long awaiting it's new superhospital, for better or worse, and the wait is now over. The Montreal Gazette reports on the sparkling new facilities, including robotic radiological equipment and "Cyberknives", hybrid operating rooms and yes, of course, pneumatic tubes:

The pneumatic tube system (PTS) doesn't qualify as medical equipment, but it's arguably one of the coolest features of the new hospital ... There is already a smaller such system at the Montreal General Hospital, but the one at the Glen is state-of-the-art and considered the optimum way to transport specimens around a hospital.

The journalist can barely contain their excitement about this "state-of-the-art technology", the coolest addition to the sparkling new superhospital breathlessly discussed.

Many thanks to Long Branch Mike for sending these links!

Image of another utopian megastructure in Montreal, Habitat 67, from AV Design Flikr, under Creative Commons Licence. See the hospital's website for pictures of their system.

other autumn odours

It was perhaps the most stunning week I have ever spent in Paris. Late summer spreading into early autumn, gentle light and every day blue skies and 20 degrees. It was buttery toast weather, crisp, decadent, soft and delicious.

So where better to head than the damp, dark, pungent sewer system under Paris' pretty streets in search of pneumatic tubes?

As the last traces of light filtered behind us, my husband and I descended into the sewer museum of Paris, Musée des Égouts de Paris, where I had a sense we might find some traces of Paris' postal pneumatic network.

We were not the only ones seeking out Paris' infrastructural splendours that day - there was a father and his two daughters in front of us, father with clipboard in hand furiously taking notes, while the girls became increasingly bored; a young couple who sped through the museum at lightening speed; a group of Dutch tourists sleeves to their noses.



As we worked our way through the tunnels we found magnificent microbiological paintings, a gallery of living art. The cool limescale smell was gradually replaced by tendrils and whiffs of what one may expect from a working sewerage system and soon we encountered the flowing rivers under our feet, washing away the city's waste. But where were the tubes?

We looked everywhere, and in the dark, couldn't see them. But they were there all along, pointed out to us by the man selling postcards near the exit. We turned our flashes on and there was the sign, "Reseau Pneumatique: Pneumatic Network" modestly hung on a winding pipe.

We followed the pipes as far as we could, until we found their sawn-off ends. It was a little glimpse of that vast network that carried millions of petit bleus at its zenith. Just like 19th century tourists of the sewer system, we marvelled at these infrastructural wonders, now rusty and calcified. What will the tourists of the next generation visit - our underground fiber optical webs, another network hidden from view?

All images my own.

radio day

It is that time of the week for some pneumatic distraction. A good old fashioned radio show this time. Via soundcloud you can listen to Roman Mars interview Molly Steenson about pneumatic tubes on the San Francisco radio show dedicated to design, architecture and the built environment, 99% Invisible. It is a great radio documentary on the topic, with sound recordings of tubes, sitcoms and trash disposal.



In the show Molly Steenson ponders on why pneumatic tubes are so magical and suggests that they inspire wonder because they feel as if they are alive, extending breathing electrical tentacles through the city. They feel a lot bigger than we are she further suggests and most romantic of all, if you scent a handkerchief through the tubes, it would still smell like you.

listening in ...

A poster at the Post and Tele Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, by the pneumatic tube display ....

danish tubes in the postal museum

On a recent visit to Copenhagen, my husband and I visited the wonderful Post and Tele Museum where we not only learnt how to fold a letter and wax seal it but also found a working pneumatic tube display! Here are some photos:

 

Photos my own.

treasure in a tube

I have spent some time researching pneumatic tubes now, and they always seem to be found in American and European places. But a recent ABC podcast from Canberra, has revealed where these tubes are hidden in Australia too.  In the walls and ceilings of Old Parliament!

Michael Evans, the manager of visitor experience at the Museum of Australian Democracy in Old Parliament House, spoke to Louise Maher on the radio recently, to talk about this treasure in the museum.

He describes how there were several sets of tubes, one to the Postoffice and another 3km line to the government printers for sending out the Hansards.

For those curious to see the tubes at the museum, you can see them in the downstairs gallery, at the old post office and in the Attendant's Booth in the House of Representative's Chamber. Not all the tubes are there, but there are "some ends of it you can see" (see photo). Michael exclaims, that it is "really an untapped project to go and map what is there and what isn't there".

There is one section that still works but is not in action at the moment in order to preserve the technology - however Michael says that they want to get this working so that their visitors can see and hear the tubes (the thunk!).

Listen to the Treasure Trove podcast here.

And read the museum blogpost on Lamsons here.

opening the tubes up to tourists

Pneumatic tube aficionados visiting Prague in the near future should be interested to know that the pneumatic post system there has recently been purchased by Zdenek Drazil from Windcom, who plans, according to the Prague Daily Monitor, to "revitalise it and use it in education as well as a tourist attraction at Prague Castle".

And it seems that those longing to send their mail by pneumatic post may have a chance to relive this experience if the venture goes ahead. Drazil says, "I would like the principles (of the pneumatic post) to be used in teaching the physical principles to students. I am also sure that the terminal at Prague Castle in the spaces of Ceska posta could be successful. Tourists could inspect it and send a postcard or a letter through it". Reason enough indeed for a visit!

Image of Prague tube station from m4r00n3d's photostream