hyper interest in hyperloop

It would have been hard recently to have escaped news updates on the Hyperloop, with reports of its first test, as well as talk of the Hyperloop coming to Europe.

The Minister of Infrastructure and the Environment in the country I am living in, the Netherlands, apparently being a "hyperloop enthusiast". Delft University will launch Europe's first test track.

Despite being quite a different kind of infrastructural set-up, the Hyperloop continues to be compared to pneumatic tube systems in much of this reporting. See for example, the Business Insider which traces the history of technologies which preceded the Hyperloop, and includes various different pneumatic tube systems.

Image used under CC lisence, from Wikimedia Commons.

travel by tube "a thing"

The Hyperloop continues to make news and continues to be linked to pneumatic tubes. See the latest in this article in Automobile, which calls the Hyperloop a "series of powerful pneumatic tubes", or the human equivalent of the plastic tubes in bank drive-thrus.

Image from Kevin Krejci's Flickr, 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.

pneumatic news

Latest WIRED news from friend Brian (who could have done something similar himself (and may still do ;)): Elon Musk's hyperloop will start construction next year - stay tuned!

Image from Twitter.

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.

pneumatic tube transportation, or the love of technology

The dream of tube transport is still alive. This time it is an American entrepreneur, Elon Musk, who has indicated plans to whizz travellers around in a tube. According to the WIRED/CNN article where I read this news, Musk's intention is to "revolutionize transportation" in the U.S. Called the "Hyperloop" the system is described as being "similar to the old-school pneumatic tube systems" but more complicated, more like "a cross between a concorde, a railgun and an air hockey table". The system will be combined with magnetic levitation, and be built either above ground or under water, both being a major infrastructural challenge.

This kind of idea isn't new of course. VacTrains have captured the imagination of engineers and science-fiction writers for over a century. In real life there has been the Atmospheric Railway which I blogged about recently and perhaps most famously Alfred Beach's NYC system, both of which failed to fully eventuate.

So why does the idea linger? What brings entrepreneurs to tube transportation decade after decade? Do we now have the technologies to support this idea, or are we destined for another Beach system, another ARAMIS? Either way, it is always about a love of technology ...

Read about Beach's pneumatic tube transportation dream here (NYC subway essay) and here (Joseph Brennan's wonderful online book).  

Image from DavidsZondy.com, transportation of the future.