caught in the tube but no 'arm done

I noticed the other day, for the first time (although I am sure that someone has told me before), that my local supermarket has Lamson pneumatic tube systems at the cash registers. It may just be the extreme weariness that overcomes me at the Albert Heijn but it shows you have to keep your eyes out for this technology!

Eyes out, but arms in! A poor Tesco's duty manager made news in Manchester recently because of an unfortunate incident at his pneumatic cash system. The young man's arm got caught in the tube system, suspended vertically for 30 minutes. The reasons the limb found it into the vacuum are unclear - perhaps doing some "maintenance work" on the tube? Fire crews came to the rescue and dismantled the tube, using a (pneumatic) saw to release the man from the contraption. Unfortunately for the red-faced duty manager, as it was a 24 hour supermarket the store didn't close during the fireman's efforts so there were plenty of spectators to enjoy the event.

jetsons again

Described as the most Jetsonian of technological wonders, pneumatic tubes were the topic of the Smithsonian blog recently. Matt Novak described how pneumatic tubes appeared in a particular episode amongst a dazzling array of other futuristic technologies such as videophones, 3D TV, cleaning robots and moving sidewalks. All of these technologies he suggests, are "masquerading as scenery while they're in fact the star of the show".

This episode is titled Miss Solar System, and was aired on February 10th, 1963. It featured a horizontal pneumatic tube system with multiple points of entry and exit, which differed from the vertical systems used in previous episodes.

Image from the Smithsonian blog.

in the newsroom

Julie Starr posted this wonderful photo from the New Zealand Herald Manual of Journalism, 1967, on her blog The Evolving Newsroom. It appears that accepting copy from the editorial department and sending galley proofs via pneumatic tubes was once a busy job for printers - I can see at least seven shutes!

basement oracle

Late last year an empty library was transformed into a free art/music event for Madison residents. The one day festival Bookless (see more details on the Library as Incubator Project site), celebrated many loved features of the old Madison Central Library including card catalogues and pneumatic tubes. The pneumatic tubes, pictured here in their former life, were turned into a basement oracle, delivering fortunes to Bookless visitors.

As messages are delivered from pneumatic pipes, they often appear to come from nowhere - an oldfashioned mystery - capturing the imagination of the public. My sister Chelsea will be writing a guest post for pneumaticpost on other ways in which pneumatic tubes have been used in museums, as ways of fascinating and engaging visitors.

Image of the pneumatic tubes in the old Madison Central Library from Madison Guy's Flikr photostream. See Madison Public Library's Flikr photostream for an image from the Bookless exhibition.

waiting and watching some tubes

Waiting for a baby to come - image by Andy from a radiology waiting room, Panti Rapih Hospital, Indonesia.

sounding underground: a mutimedia experiment

The Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab has a very interesting online journal called Sensate: A Journal for Experiments in Critical Media Practice.

The website for the journal is beautifully designed, and breaks many conventions in regards to publishing (e.g. chronology of articles).

One of the journal's articles is about a topic that has often been discussed in this blog quite frequently - the underground, or more specifically in this case Sounding Underground.

The article by Ximena Alarcon examines underground life in the subways of London, Paris and Mexico City, using a collage of photographs, text and sound recordings, displayed in non-linear format using Zeega. Some of the screens work better than others (the screens with websites in motion are somewhat nauseating), but those that do work well (soundscapes and photographs in particular) give a colourful, cacophonous sense of underground life that would be difficult to achieve with text alone.

Image of Alfred Beach's pneumatic underground idea from InkBlueSky.

hospital design by doctor-architects: an exhibition

Readers of this blog may be interested in a new exhibition at the Osler Library in Montreal, Canada, about the contributions of doctors to hospital design. The exhibition is curated by Professor Annmarie Adams and showcases material from the library's architectural history collection. Alongside other themes, it examines the role of hospitals as tourist destinations, with objects such as hospital postcards and boardgames. Interestingly hospitals have now become a tourist destination for the retronaut, visiting pneumatic tube systems (see previous blog posts here, here and here).

The exhibitions runs through August 2013.
Architectural illustration by John Harris.

pneumatic tubes in literature: the beginnings of a list

After writing numerous posts now about appearances of pneumatic tube systems in fiction, I thought it would be worthwhile to start a list of these books. Most books I have come across rather randomly, so if you can think of any others to add to the list please add them in the comments!

Paul Auster: Invisible
Edward Bellamy (1888): Looking Backward
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
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

the sieve and the sand

It's Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Montag is in the vacuum-underground with the Bible in his hands. He is in "a loud car with blaring advertisements for Dentrifice, a train radio which vomits a ton-load of music made of tin, copper, silver, chromium, and brass" (p103). The people around him are pounded into submission; "there was no place to run". The "great air-train" that they travel in, falling down its shaft into the earth, resembles their fall into a bookless-hell, where all thoughts are governed by those in power. As Montag rushes "through the dead cellars of town, jolting him, he remembered the terrible logic of that sieve ... there were people in the suction train but he held the book in his hands and the silly thought came to him, if you read fast and read all, maybe some of the sand will stay in the sieve" (pp102 - 103). He does read and he remembers.

Later Montag catches the air-train again. An old man talks to him and talks to him "as the train was sucked from one end of the night city to the other on one long sickening gasp of motion" (p133). The pneumatic tube is a nauseating, suffocating place in Fahrenheit 451, where those who ride it are merely being taken for a ride, unquestioning cogs in the system.

Image from American Buddha.

another tour of the lost technology

For the second time, the public was granted an insider's peak into Stanford Hospital's pneumatic tube system recently, opened again for Atlas Obscura.

Retronaut Annetta Black reported on the tour of the system (and Gever Tulley kindly uploaded photos from the tour onto his Flikr site for sharing). Black describes Standford's tubes as quiet and efficient (although ear plugs needed!), and surprisingly common place. The report appears amongst a series of essays and photographs about pneumatic tubes on the beautifully designed Atlas Obscura website. Not surprising considering that the pneumatic tube system at the New York Public Library made it to the site's top ten most popular places for 2012, and as Black states: "for many retro-tech enthusiasts, pneumatic dispatch is the holy grail of awesome lost technologies".

Image from Gever Tulley's photostream.