strike

Last month I not only did a lot of travelling on planes but also trains. Sometimes the trains ran smoothly, according to schedules. Other times they stopped altogether, because of strikes, train journeys flashing on boards but never to run. During strikes travellers are reminded of the invisible human work that goes into getting them from A to B, C and D.

There is also of course much invisible human labour that either gets displaced by, or is involved in, the operating of pneumatic tubes. And in times of revolt (just as in times of breakdown), this invisible work also becomes more visible.

Several weeks ago, hospital workers in Malta took action against their working conditions during a strike. The Union Haddiema Maghqudin issued directives to laboratory technicians of the Mater Dei hospital in Malta to refuse to process essential and urgent blood tests. They were to do this by not accepting blood samples through the pneumatic tube system.

This meant that no blood results were issued and nurses and midwives were forced, according to Malta Today, to "abandon their wards" and take the samples physically to the laboratory, where they could "beg" technicians to perform the tests. The hospitals encouraged their staff to counteract the strike by continuing to send samples through the tubes, and if returned, to keep sending them in hope that the technicians accept the blood samples eventually.

It was a battle conducted through the tubes, with blood literally, flying back and forth. The hospital and newspapers both declared this a matter of life and death. The issue not only highlighted how integral the infrastructure is to patient care, but also the kinds of work both entailed in keeping it running, as well as the kind of work it replaced, nurses work on wards for example. In this case an infrastructure of connection become central to, and highlighted the disconnections between hospitals, governments and staff in which it was embedded.

Image my own.

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!

contamination risk?

Can the use of pneumatic tubes to transport lab samples of a deadly virus lead to wider contamination? This is the fear of some hospital staff where an Ebola patient has been treated recently in Maryland, U.S.

The hospital, in an attempt to calm such fears, issued a statement declaring that while the lab samples of the patient did travel by pneumatic tube during his first visit to the hospital, at no time did they leak or spill from their bag or carrier into the tube system. During the patient's second visit, the pneumatic tube system was not used. Specimens were instead "triple bagged", placed in a container, placed in another container and then hand-carried to the lab via a "buddy system". Contrast this with health facilities in Guinea, where nurses don't even have an adequate supply of gloves, as reported in this blogpost, part of Somatosphere's intelligent coverage of the disastrous epidemic, Ebola Fieldnotes.

Image of biohazard bags for pneumatic tube system, my own.

from the point of view of a capsule

Some of you may have already seen a video doing the rounds this week through blogs, where a Go Pro video camera takes a ride through a Norwegian parliament pneumatic tube system:



It's not the first tube cam video, nor will I imagine it being the last. This video differs a little from the previously somewhat clunky smartphone videos which have been posted, giving some sense of not only the dizzying trip through the tubes, kind of like metallic endoscopy footage, but also the stops and starts, the turn arounds and switches. The fact that this is a tube system in parliament is interesting. More about that in upcoming posts. The video offers a glimpse of what we don't normally see: the inside of infrastructure, and the way the movement of objects is organised. We feel the pressure and effects of vacuum. And perhaps even a little about what life is like as a pneumatic tube capsule, whizzing from one station to the next.

For those readers interested in the possibilities of, and social consequences of Go Pro cameras, there is a great New Yorker article on the topic.

birthday post

It's my birthday coming up soon and I've received an early present from a very thoughtful gift-giver:

Yes, I now have my own capsule! It sits on my desk at the moment. I can feel its worn-away felt ends, cold metal body, thready canvas details. I can look inside at its rusty insides. The little door squeaks as it moves, a satisfying suck of air and click as it closes completely. These are the sensory and material details of pneumatic tubes which I love.

If I look closely, engraved on the capsule are the words "The Grover Co. Detroit". My gift giver helps me to research the capsule's provenance. We find that the Grover Company was selling pneumatic tubes at the same time as Lamson, in the early 20th century, servicing department stores whose needs had extended beyond their cash railway systems. William and Clarence Grover founded the company in Woodburn, Michigan, but had branches in Detroit too. In the 1950s the Grover Company filed patents for pneumatic tube terminals. According to the Cash Railway site, Swisslog is the company's descendant. 

I am sure there is much more to discover of the history of my tube.

Image my own.

hotel post

In the novel I am reading at the moment, Night Film, the characters have just followed the trail of their mystery to the Waldorf Hotel, in New York City. They frantically search for all signs of their victim. If the story had been set 100 years ago, they may have found some traces in the pneumatic tube. The Waldorf Astoria had its very own system for sending cards announcing visitors and other information, shot up in carriers "to the desired floor within a few seconds", according to the hotel website. If you have access to old copies of the Scientific American, you can read more about the system here.

Information and image from: Boldt, George C., 1851-1916, “The Clock; Pneumatic Tubes for Visitor's Cards,” Host to the World, accessed October 21, 2014, http://www.hosttotheworld.com/omeka/items/show/189.

lost tubes

Lost is one of those TV shows with their very own pneumatic tube system (see others in the list here). The system is located on Station 5, The Pearl, part of the DHARMA research initiative. The pneumatic tubes are used by the Pearl inhabitants, who are part of a creepy experiment to observe others in an experiment, while being observed themselves. The Pearl researchers use the tubes to send in their notebooks filled with observations.

The orientation video for the research instructs: "careful observation is the only key to true and complete awareness". This could be an orientation video for doing ethnographic fieldwork! "Remember, everything that occurs, no matter how minute or of seeming unimportance, must be recorded", the video further explains. Good advice. Time-consuming though. Nevertheless, hundreds of notebooks were diligently filled and sent off in the tubes. To where? Nowhere it seems. The tubes ended up in a desolate space, like landfill, lost in an empty field.

I can't help but wonder if their are similarities here with the digital data-storing practices which research councils are now encouraging (or obliging) researchers to participate in, including anthropologists. Who is going to read through all of those fieldnotes and make sense of an ethnographer's scribblings?

You can watch the Station 5 (The Pearl) Orientation video instructing Pearl inhabitants how to use the system here.

Thanks to Maarten for putting me on to this!

Image and further information from which this post is based from Lostpedia.

pneumatic tubes on TV: the beginnings of a list

I love lists. Making them, ticking things off them. So its time for another pneumatic tube list. We've already had the list of pneumatic tubes in literature and a list of pneumatic tubes in film. Now for a list of TV shows, where pneumatic tubes make an appearance:

Fantasy Island

Futurama

Hallo Spencer

The Jetsons

Lost

The Simpsons

Please let me know if there is anything missing!

There will be more posts about some of these shows coming up. In the meantime, you can entertain yourself with clips of The Jetsons, Lost or Hallo Spencer.

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.

flying fish

You've probably heard of fish ladders, but have you heard of fish pneumatic tubes? This is one of my favourite recent pneumatic tube discoveries - the use of the system in fisheries to move fish around. I reported on it a few months ago in my ten bizarre and incredible uses of pneumatic tubes list. Now the system is making more headlines.

Labelled the salmon cannon, the digital magazine Takepart discusses the use of the technology to separate wild and farmed fish, a task normally done by hand. It's seen as a much more fish-friendly option, the salmon reportedly departing from their pneumatic voyage unscathed. Not all commentators on the story were convinced. Environmental organisations though seem to be on board.

"It may be funny, and it may sound ridiculous, but we're dealing with the serious issue of fish and water usage" Whooshh's vice president Todd Deligan told the magazine. A historian at the recent infrastructure conference I went to in Copenhagen asked me; how do the companies deal with the serious issue of selling something seen as so fun? Obviously from Todd Deligan's comments, it takes a bit of work to convince the public there is a serious side to flying fish through a tube.

Image from treehugger.