sent via atomic fairies and unicorns

Plenty of pneumatic tubes have been captured on Kodak film, although unlike today's camera, the smartphone, it would have been difficult to make the kind of videos I reported on last week with a film camera.

It turns out that Kodak was using pneumatic tubes themselves, but for a very strange purpose - to transport nuclear tests as late as 2006. They had their very own nuclear reactor which was housed in a "closely guarded, two-foot-think concrete walled underground bunker in the company's headquarters" in Rochester New York, according to this Gizmodo report. Reminiscent of the fantastical contemporary art installation in Paris recently, it was "fed tests" by pneumatic tube system, with no employees ever making contact with the reactor. In a sarcastic wink to the fact that humans are always mixed up with technologies, Gizmodo report that apparently the system must have been operated by "atomic fairies and unicorns".

Thanks again to Long Branch Mike for sharing with me another fascinating piece of pneumatic tube pneus.

Flickr image by Asja Boros used under the Creative Commons lisence.

hyper testing

Hyperloop Technologies will start testing it's transportation system "of the future" very soon, so WIRED reports. Still being compared to pneumatic tubes, the Hyperloop is gaining more and more press these days.

Forbes recently wrote about the patent implications of the technology. Apparently there have been already 30 inventions related to pneumatic mass transportation, the earliest dating to 1799.

Those interested in reading about the financial details and people managing this project, may want to read this other Forbes article, or for a fascinating review of the new book about the mastermind behind the invention, Elon Musk, see the London Review of Books.

Image of UCLA architecture students' imagined Hyperloopfrom DesignMilk used under a Creative Commons lisence.

we've looked at fish, now chips

Last time you were sitting at your favourite black jack table did you wonder where all those chips and money were disappearing after being swept up by the dealer's little broom? The answer should be obvious by now!

Several pneumatic tube companies have specialised products for their casino clients, such as Lamson's automated system (described as the "evolution of the drop box", putting a whole new spin on that place we all store our files). Aerocom has systems for gaming pits, count rooms, cash cages and high-roller rooms (amazing words, most of which I didn't even know existed before researching this post).

Pneumatic tubes aren't only in modern day casinos, but have appeared in famous casinos from the past, such as the Resi in Berlin. You can read more about the Resi on one of my previous blogposts, as well as here, at Caberet Berlin.

So we've looked at fish, and now chips. For those interested in both, you can read the fascinating history of fish and chips here!

Lapsed London history

I can highly recommend a new article on pneumatic tubes which has appeared recently on the slickly designed Lapsed Historian website. Written by a transportoholic and history lover known as Long Branch Mike, the article entitled Get Them on the Blower traces the history of postal pneumatic tubes in London. Rich in historical detail and imagery, the article is also filled with a physical sense of the materiality of the tubes in the 19th century, with stories of experiments in making them of leather, felt, vulcanised fibre, celluloid, alluminium, brass and finally plastic with felt or leather lining. There is a lot of new material for those already familiar with pneumatic tube systems and some novel links to other fascinating kinds of tubes such as speaking tubes (see below) and voice pipes.

Reader's interested in London's pneumatic tube transport systems may be interested in Ian Steadman's article in The New Statesman.

Speaking tubes image from Wikipedia. See also the following website for a comprehensive account of speaking tubes and voicepipes: http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/COMMS/voicepipe/voicepipe.htm

documents and other objects, flying around

I've been doing a bit of flying in and out of Amsterdam's Schiphol airport recently. During one trip I visited a branch of my bank, to ensure my debit card wouldn't be blocked in the U.S. I had heard that there were pneumatic tubes connecting several branches of a bank in the airport. But there were no signs of the system to be found. Until I opened up my email back in Maastricht that is ...

There was a message from Patryk Wasiak, a cultural historian I met in Copenhagen recently, at the History of Infrastructure conference. And with his note was a scanned picture from a 1981 edition of the "Przeglad Techniczny" (Technical Review). Patryk tells me that the image (below, and enlarged above) accompanied an article about the recently opened airport terminal, celebrating its technological marvels. The caption for the photo says the airport pneumatic tube system was used to transfer travel documents between old and new terminals.

There are so many hidden networks and infrastructures in airports to which travellers are oblivious. We mostly think about how our luggage arrives, or how to get to our gate. We are the moving bodies, maybe our luggage too. But there is a whole manner of different kinds of travelling occurring in these places. Documents from one building to the next in the 1980s. Money between bank branches. Animals in and out of quarantine, nearby nature reserves, crates and cages (see more in Susanne Bauer and colleagues' work on animal ecologies in airports). For non-places, there is a lot moving around behind the departure lounge drudgery and duty-free gloss!

tubes fit for a king

My favourite pneumatic tube spotter just sent me a preview for Kingsman: The Secret Service. Is that a luxurious pneumatic tube transporter hidden there?

pneumatic dispatches for 2013

2013 was another wonderful year of pneumatic discoveries, marking the fourth year of this blog. A highlight was certainly my tour of the Hortig pneumatic tube factory in Bayreuth Germany, documented in a series of posts about the beginnings of the adventure, the workshop, sounds of the factory and the testing room (with more posts from this tour possibly to come). I also had a fantastic tour of a Melbourne Hospital pneumatic tube system, and others also had tours of pneumatic tube systems guided by Atlas Obscura.

Another exciting moment in 2013 was being interviewed by Jacob Aron for an article in New Scientist about pneumatic tube systems. His article was published around the time that pneumatic tubes made general news, when Elon Musk announced his intentions to revolutionize transport with his Hyperloop system. Many reporters compared the Hyperlink to pneumatic tube systems (although it somewhat different, it is in a tube). Fans of pneumatic tube systems were aware of course that this is not such a new idea, with VacTrains and Atmospheric Railways previously capturing the imagination of engineers.

Last year saw a few art installations such as PNEUMAtic circUS, a networked postal art project curated by Vittore Baroni, and the basement oracle in Madison Central Library, as well as DIY projects such as one cool dad's home built pneumatic tube system for tooth fairy transportation. I also attempted the beginnings of a list of pneumatic tubes in fiction, which I updated as the year progressed, sometimes finding mention of the tube in surprising locations (Mr Ian McEwan). More detailed posts were written about Fahrenheit 451, The Atmospheric Railway and The Innocent.

There were also posts throughout the year about pneumatic tubes in newsrooms, dancehalls and cafes. And finally, who could forget the unfortunate Tesco's duty manager who got his arm caught in the supermarket's tube system, not the first it seems, with others also finding their limbs sucked into a pneumatic system.

Image my own from fieldwork in Melbourne, Australia.

elon musk's non-pneumatic tube

You've probably heard by now about Elon Musk's 6 billion dollar plan to whizz Americans from one end of the country to another by tube transport (read my previous post about it here). Here is the "napkin sketch" of the system:

And if you have read any of the media coverage, you've probably read something about pneumatic tubes too.

It seems that journalists can't help but compare the Hyperloop to pneumatic tubes, despite the engineering principles being quite different, and Musk's insistence that it works very differently to pneumatic tube systems. The Telegraph describes the Hyperloop as a modern day pneuamatic travel system, while The L.A. Times calls is the "equivalent of a 450-mile pneumatic tube". WIRED write that the engineering is similar to "old-school" pneumatic tube systems, and the Globe and Mail said the Hyperloop system was "not unlike the pneumatic tubes that transport capsules stuffed with paperwork in older buildings. In this case, the cargo would be several people, reclining for the ride".

Why do the comparisons persist? Well besides the obvious tube-like appearance of the transportation system, I think that these comparisons tie into a romantic notion of transporting people around the world like parcels and letters, by pneumatics. As I wrote previously, it is a science-fiction fantasy imagined by many entrepreneurs in the past, so a comparison to pneumatic tubes links Elon Musk to this lineage of great imagination.

His ideas certainly seem to have sparked the imaginations of many tech-bloggers and micro-bloggers who are already lining up for the first $20 ticket. For others though it has led to daydreams of times gone by, such as Paul Whitefield from the LA Times:

"I remember when we had pneumatic tubes here at The Times. We used them to whoosh cylinders full of important documents from the newsroom on the third floor to the composing room on the second floor. Quite often, they got stuck. People got paid to fish the cylinders out. One time, a fellow newsman tried to do the job himself. He got his arm stuck in the tube. So the people who got paid to fish the cylinders out had to fish him out too. It's just one more great thing about journalism that the Internet has killed".

Image from Twitter.

irish pneumatics

I attended a medical sociology conference in Belfast recently, at the beautiful Queen's University. I wasn't expecting to talk about pneumatic tubes here (although Belfast is famous for a pneumatic invention of another kind), but rather about the healthcare professions.

One morning as I was preparing for the conference, I was listening to the BBC news and pneumatic tubes appeared on the hotel TV screen. A new hospital was opening its doors in Wolf Lough, near Enniskillen. The first new hospital to be built in Northern Ireland in over a decade, a sign of further rejuvenation of this previously troubled area.

Amongst the other "state to the art technology" being showcased was a "vacuum transfer system" to "allow for drugs, products and lab reports to be transferred around the hospital without being totally reliant on porters. It will also help speed up the discharge of patients who are often delayed awaiting prescriptions".

The hospital is said to epitomise "everything that is modern in a 21st century health service". There are no wards, just single rooms, each complete with flatscreen TVs and floor to ceiling windows said to promote therapeutic healing. The Royal College of Nursing is worried that there aren't enough nurses for this new layout.

Not enough nurses, too many porters. Although more nurses and porters are being hired for the hospital, these new hospital designs are shifting divisions of labour on the wards. What does it mean that the vacuum transfer system will make the hospital less reliant on porters? How will the work load of nurses change with these single bed rooms? Are architects now becoming a new healing profession, with their therapeutic window designs?

Pneumatic tube technologies and other aspects of contemporary hospital design raise these kinds of questions about how healthcare professions are continually evolving, and I had plenty to think about while joining the discussions at Queen's.

freight tubes of the future

Thanks to Andy for sending me this picture from Retronaut, of the 1920s city of the future, complete with freight tubes: