speak easy

A new speakeasy has opened up in town, serving delicious cocktails in a warm stony basement. Mostly I see groups of friends and a few couples enjoying the cloistered space. They seem to be having a good time but what I haven't seen is any flirting between the groups over their whiskey sours. In Berlin in the 1920s, there was plenty of nightclub flirting, and pneumatic tubes were central to how love letters would be sent from table to table.

Atlas Obscura called it the Tinder of the 20th Century. Their recent article talks about the Resi and the Femina, the first which I have written about previously on this blog.

Fascinatingly the article discusses how the notes passed by the tubes were first censored in the switchroom, described as an early form of comment moderation, and that among the many gifts that people could send to each other were perfume and cocaine. Atlas Obscura also makes the connection between the tubes and the telephone song in Cabaret, the first song I know about with a pneumatic theme.

Image from Cabaret Berlin.

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.

more tubes on display

Pneumatic tubes create not only wonderful museum exhibits, but also gallery installations too. The network of pipes have inspired artists such as: Yvonne lee Schultz, whose installation Thoughts was installed in the European Patent Office in 2004 (there are many fantastic pneumatic tube related patents in archives, in offices and online!); Serge Spitzer's Re/Search: Bread and Butter and the ever present Question of How to define the difference between a Baguette and a Croissant (II), which was shown at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, in 2010; and most recently, PNEUMAtic circUS's Octo, on display at the transmediale festival for art and digital culture, in Berlin in 2013.

Image of Serge Spitzer's installation at Palais de Tokyo.

pneu and old exhibitions

We can learn a lot about pneumatic tube systems from the material exhibited, and in the archives, of museums. Through such artifacts we learn about the materials used in these systems over time, about the ways in which they were mapped, drawn, and adapted by users. These materials also make great objects for display, offering lots of fun potential for inter-museum romances by post, and other correspondences.

Fantastic pneumatic tube content can be found in permanent installations in museums such as the Post and Tele Museum in Copenhagen, La Musee de La Poste in Paris, the Museum fur Kommunikation in Berlin, the Technisches Museum in Vienna and the Luftmuseum in Amberg. And in the Museum of London and York's National Railway Museum you can visit two original capsules from the London Pneumatic Dispatch Company.

There are many other science museums which also have small installations, some interactive, such as at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, where visitors can feed tennis balls into tubes and at the Museum of Science in Boston, where visitors can send magnetic "letters" by pneumatics. You can watch videos of visitors interacting with the system in Berlin here (including tube cam!) and another terrific one here.

Some museum workshops and exhibitions are more temporary. Several years ago I wrote about the Fast Trash exhibition in New York, which explored the fascinating story of Roosevelt Island's pneumatic garbage system.

A little further back, in 2006 the Smithsonian Museum had a Marvelous Ways to Move Mail exhibition, with the Missile Mail and Pneumatic Tubes activity, involving visitors building cardboard missiles (read more from the museum about pneumatic tubes here).

At the Australian Museum of Democracy, students learn about the Franklin River debate in Tasmania, through an interactive workshop which involves them sending a copy of a conservation act to the House of Representatives chamber through the museums' pneumatic tube system. The students love it!

For those interested in these kind of events, this summer in New Mexico, US, The Parachute Company will host hands-on workshops in libraries specifically about pneumatic tubes. Visitors will find a system of tubes, through which they can send their own messages in canisters. They will be encouraged to use a range of printing techniques to craft their messages, including cryptography. The workshop is designed to explore how networks work, through creative engagements with pneumatic technology. The Parachute Company organises these kinds of events for the public to explore and have fun with technology, art and culture. For more details of this and other workshops this summer, see the Hitchhiker website for New Mexico librarians.

Coming up soon: pneumatic tubes in art galleries
Images from Phanomenta Das Science-Centre, from Wikimedia and from pilot_micha's Flikr page.

touring underground

Summer is approaching in Europe and as the skies become bluer and the sun slightly warmer, some of us are dreaming of holidays trips in places a little cooler and darker: the underground.

For centuries tourists in Europe have been fascinated by the underground. In Notes on the Underground, Rosalind Williams writes of popular destinations for 19th century travellers such as caves in Belgium and sewers in Paris. Along with the Magic Underground Tunnels, these subterranean honeypots are also on my travel wishlist, especially the Les Grottes de Remouchamps in The Belgian Ardennes, the Musée des égouts (The Museum of the Sewers) in Paris (thank you Melissa!), and the watery labyrinths of the Dutch city Den Bosch.

For pneumatic tube enthusiasts there are a number of underground tours, such as the Berliner Unterwelten, which has previously run special tours of the pneumatic tube system such as for students of the MA Historical Urban Studies program at the Centre for Metropolitan Studies in Berlin, and annually Atlas Obscura often runs a tour of the Stanford Hospital pneumatic tube system.

Images from Berlin underground tours from Toni Escuder's, escpeapalumni and Maha's Flikr pages.

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.

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.

pneumatic circus

I have covered various artistic interpretations of pneumatic tubing systems before on this blog, as well as museum displays for children, but I have just been told about one of the most imaginative, interactive and creative pneumatic tube artistic installations yet: PNEUMAtic circUS.

PNEUMAtic circUS was a networked postal art project curated by Vittore Baroni, music critic, "explorer of countercultures", and avid activist for mail art, in collaboration with Tatiana Bazzichelli (sociologist of communication with interest in hactivism), Jonas Frankki (designer responsible for Berlin collective Telekommunisten) and Mauro Guazzotti (leader of experimental noise/industrial band). It was held as part of the transmediale festival for art and digital culture, from January to February 2013 in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

The project involved one hundred mail artists sending in pneumatic post capsules with instructions and scores to be used by the festival visitors for actions and performances.

Artists came from sixteen countries. That is twice as many countries as arms of an octopus, the mascot for the project, also fabulously called P7C-1 Intertubular Octosocial Pneumatical Postal Network, with its tentacles of tubing spreading across the installation space.

You can find the gorgeous catalogue from the installation here (front cover below), with essays from the curators and many images too. The digital catalogue was unveiled recently in Viareggio, the launch marked by further pneumatic performances, with a workshop where attendees could create and transmit their own messages.

See also the Telekommunisten.net website for more about the exhibition and a terrific "inside the OCTO" video.

Images used with permission from the PNEUMAtic circUS Flikr page.

the final days of our medical museums?

Following the surprising news earlier this year that the Boerhaave Museum is on the brink of closure, another medical museum, the Medizinhistoriche Museum in Berlin, threatens to close.

Image from the Medical History Museum, University of Melbourne.

underground explorers

Rosalind Williams describes the underworld as a technological achievement. In Notes on the Underground she writes that the descent below the earth's surface was a quest for scientific truth and technological power. The subterranean world of modern industry began to be built in the late 1700s in the form of canals and railroads. The second stage came in the last half of the nineteenth century with the creation of networks to support this industrial metropolis: sewers, subways and lines of communication.

"As Mumford pointed out in early drafts for Technics, in the nineteenth century city planning began to involve not only the disposition of the surface but also an 'underground system of functions [that] form as it were the physiological apparatus of the new city ... the modern city plan involves a co-ordination of the super-surface city with the sub-surface city.' As some more recent historians of technology say, the modern metropolis is a 'networked city'" (p52)

As an example, Williams writes that Paris developed "a system of multipurpose underground galleries", large enough for other networks to be suspended from the roof of the sewers such as water lines, gas lines, and of course, pneumatic tubes (p72). Tourists came to see these spaces, 'les egouts de Paris' being recommended in Baedeker. Similarly, modern day urban explorers hunt around the pneumatic networks and underground infrastructures of cities, marvelling at the technological achievements of the past and present, tourists of subterranean wonder.

Image from manu_le_manu's Flikr album.

pneumatic tube correspondence of the week 4

via Berlin Rohrpost

Image from wikipedia.

signs of tubes in berlin

As I mentioned in a previous post, I visited Berlin recently and was looking out for signs of the rorhpost. Here is a glimpse I found in the Museum für Kommunikation Berlin:

Like in the museum, the tubes are fairly hidden, and take a little bit of searching out, but there they are all along ...

the last letter

I saw this letter, sent via rohrpost, at the Jewish Museum in Berlin last month.

Here is the tragic story of this piece of mail, transcribed from the museum text:

"Martha Liebermann, the aging widow of painter Max Liebermann, who died in 1935, wrote this letter to a family friend on March 4, 1943: "Dear esteemed Mr. Alenfeld, I am totally flustered! The bank did not even pay the small amount I requested. Were it not for a friendly visit, I would not have any money at all! Worse still, everyone is frightening me with their talk of deportation! I eagerly await your arrival ... Please, please answer me, gratefully yours, Martha L."

But Erich Alenfeld arrived too late. Just before Martha Liebermann was to be taken from her apartment the next morning, she took an overdose of the barbiturate Veronal"

rohrpost easter

Over Easter my husband and I went to Berlin, home of one of the largest pneumatic dispatch systems (rohrpost) in the world. We found evidence of this history in the Museum für Kommunikation Berlin, a rather quirky place, with a dark little basement crypt dedicated to their treasures, including the capsules below (with more photographs soon).

I looked everywhere for evidence of the old system on the streets or in buildings but could not find it. Does anyone know were to find reminants of the old postal pneumatic tube systems in Berlin, Paris or any other city? Perhaps we could have found some signs if we had taken a tour run by the Berliner Unterwelten E.V: Society for exploration and documentation of subterranean architecture ...

pneumatic post map of the week 8

Rohrpost Berlin 1928

Image from Rice University Rohrpost site.

pneumatic tube map of the week 7

Rohrpost Reichsbank 1927-28

Map from Wikipedia.

memories of collecting

I used to collect stickers when I was a child, kneeling on asphalt at lunchtimes to swap 'furry ones' for 'shiny ones', 'scratch-and-sniffs' for those of my favourite cartoon character. I still have some of these stickers in an old lunch box. Stickers were also used in pneumatic postal systems, such as these from Berlin:

They look a little like stamps with their perforated edges. I loved collecting stamps too when I was a little older. My Canadian grandfather would send me miniature envelopes made from a clear waxy paper, filled with stamps from wonderfully exotic destinations. Some I was to keep and others were labelled in his curly, warbly writing with: 'for swaps'. Just like the stickers above, there have also been pneumatic postage stamps, as shown in a recent post, and also issued most famously by the Italian postal system.

I don't collect postage stamps anymore but seem to have a growing collection of rubber stamps for my correspondence. Rubber stamping is yet another way of marking pneumatic mail, and it was only recently that I wrote about franking stamps on this blog.

It should be of no surprise then that pneumatic tube systems have fascinated collectors for decades. Some may be serious collectors with rare stamps and vintage brass cylinders that fetch high prices on ebay. Others may just love collecting images of these systems on the internet. Collections are the archives of the curious, housed in cupboards, stamp shops, blogs, museums, galleries, sheds and shoeboxes. There is a superb exhibition on this topic at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, which I visited on the weekend. The exhibition emphasises not only the politics of collecting, but also that we are all collectors in some way ...

All images from Wikipedia

pneumatic tube map of the week 5

Rohrpost Berlin 1873

Image from Wikipedia.

pneumatic tube map of the week 4

Rohrpost Berlin 1945

From Wikipedia via Synccity blog