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.

pneumatic tubes in literature: an updated list

Some further additions to the literature list, from my own reading and some help from the Wikipedians:

Paul Auster: Invisible

Jordan Belfort: The Wolf of Wall Street
Edward Bellamy: Looking Backward
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
Jessica Grant: Love in the Pneumatic Tube Era (in Darwin's Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow, edited by Zsuzsi Gartner)
Robert Harris: An Officer and a Spy
Shena Mackay: The Atmospheric Railway: New and Selected Stories
Ian McEwan: The Innocent
Anne Michaels: The Winter Vault
George Orwell: 1984
Marcel Proust: The Way by Swann
Neal Shusterman: The Downsiders
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five

Further additions courtesy of Wikipedia:

Umberto Eco: The Prague Cemetry
Theodore Fontane: Frau Jenny Treibel (1892)
Moreton Freedgood (pen name John Godey) (1973): The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
Robert Heinlein (1949): Gulf
William Marshall: Faces in the Crowd
Albert Robida (1882): The Twentieth Century
Jean-Paul Satre (1945): The Age of Reason
Jules Verne: Paris in the 20th Century
Michel Verne (1888): An Express of the Future
Michel and Jules Verne (1889): The Day of an American Journalist in 2889



Please add to the list in your comments!

(to come - pneumatic tubes in film and TV)

pneumatics at 10 Downing St

In reading through the fascinating Talk page of the pneumatic tube Wikipedia entry the other week I came across this intriguing addition from a Wikipedian, from Peter Stothard's Thirty Days: An Inside Account of Tony Blair at War. It was a description of the underground Foreign Office (compared by him to the White House Situation Room):

Six small offices are connected by low corridors, stained white walls and scuffed blue floors that need the attentions of Ecovert and Hetty. The mood is more military than diplomatic. A young team of shift-workers, operating both encrypted computers and antique compressed-air communication tubes, gathers intelligence, turns it into memoranda and tries to make sure that the right people read it.

The Wikipedian proposes that the tubes were used in the 10 Downing Street Complex as late as the first half of 2003. In The Official History of Britain and the European Community, Stephen Wall also writes of a pneumatic tube system which ran between 10 Downing St and the Foreign Office. These stories add to the intrigue of pneumatic tube implicated in the transportation not only of lovers' secrets, but politicians' as well.

Image from onaquietday.org.

wikipedians working on the tubes

One of the most popular websites for pneumatic tubes must surely be Wikipedia - it certainly comes up as number one on my Google searches. While information on Wikipedia was once scorned as inaccurate, nowadays it is increasingly becoming the "go to" site for most people who want to find information on anything. Indeed research has shown that Wikipedia is not significantly any more inaccurate than the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Because of the work of many editors and bots, the information can be considered thoroughly reviewed, with errors supposedly picked up very quickly. So, who are these people "behind the scenes" of this ubiquitous internet site?

Early wikipedia adopters were mainly an elite group, however since 2006 the number of novice users increased steadily, gradually forming a Wikipedia community. Sociologists such as René König and Christian Pentzold have studied the practices of Wikipedians very closely, if you are interested in learning more about them. Their work led me to wonder who might be the pneumatic tube Wikipedians?

I have found one so far (and would love to know of any others out there!): Lyle Zapato, who writes about his additions to the pneumatic tube Wikipedia site, on a co-authored blog ZPi (see also his Inteli-Tube Pneumatic Tube proposal). On ZPi Lyle Zapato talks about clarifying ambiguous statements and adding pictures. He also moved a misplaced paragraph and created a separate section on pneumatic tubes in fiction. 

For those interested in the backstage of Wikipedia you can see the Pneumatic Tube page in process by comparing L.Z's original fiction paragraph to the one now on Wikipedia, which has been expanded by other pneumatic enthusiasts to include works by Umberto Eco and Douglas Adams, as well as references to Ghostbusters and videogames. For an even sneakier peak behind the scenes check out the "Talk page" (that other little clicked tab on any Wikipedia article) to see discussions about terminology, better references, and keeping the fiction section to wikistyle.

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.

pneumatic poetic

Nostalgic memories of pneumatic tubes in department stores in Edinburgh have inspired a recent poem by information designer and artist Steve Smart. Called 'The Divvy' the poem appears on his website 'Subjects, Objects, Verbs'. I highly recommend reading this wonderful poem for a sensorily rich evocation of the "secret innards of Co-Op central", also known as the "limbic original intranet of things".

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.

i love you tubes

It's back to work this week, so if you are like me you might be in the mood for a little light entertainment while at the computer (and you can learn about how capsules move in a pneumatic tube system at the same time!):

Video of David Cross loving the tubes, from Just Shoot Me!, from YouTube.

hacking into the system

Standing out amidst the 3D printers and other technological gadgets, pneumatic tubes made a splash at the Chaos Communication Congress held recently in Hamburg. WIRED's article, How to send Estonian Vodka through the Pneumatic Internet reported on the Intertubular Pneumatic Packet Distribution System which was installed by hackers in the conference centre.

This system was inspired by the Octo project which I have reported on previously (above), which in turn was inspired by the Rohrposts of the past. "Occasionally emitting a buzz as something whizzed overhead", the Hamburg system had 15 switching points, creating a network of glowing capsules which no doubt kept hackers amused during more intense discussions of terrorist surveillance.

Image of Octo used with permission from the PNEUMAtic circUS Flikr page

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.