pneumatic tubes on film: a list

Undergrounds, streets, shares, shadows, kisses, love letters, ghosts, slime, memories, memos, control, spies and many many secrets - this is pneumatic tubes on film and the beginnings of a list:

1984
À bout de souffle
Argo
Baisers Voles (Stolen Kisses)
Brazil
Le Courniaud (The Sucker)
Ghostbusters II
Olsenbande-Filme (Part 12)
The Living Daylights
The Shadow
Une Femme est une Femme
Wolf of Wall Street

What is missing?

political pipelines

Continuing with our current pneumatic tube movie theme, time for another spy agency, MI6, and the dashing James Bond. Its The Living Daylights, and Agent 007 has been assigned to help a defective KGB officer escape from a concert hall in Bratislava, in the then Czechoslovakia. What better way to do this than through a pipe.

Bond uses the Trans-Siberian Pipeline to smuggle his man, thanks to the help of a contact who works for the pipeline. To do so, 007 uses a cleaning capsule (otherwise known as a pipeline inspection gauge) specially designed by the Q Branch. The KGB officer is a bit hesitant about becoming a human specimen in the pipeline. He asks Bond how many times they've done this before - "Relax" Bond says, "you're the first".

OK, this isn't technically a pneumatic tube, but it looks so much like one! And it was too tempting to post this not only because of the current "gas war", but also because, well, it is James Bond and its not everyday that someone wears a tux when sending a capsule off through an international pipeline.

Images and information for this blogpost resourced from The Air Pump and James Bond Gadgets file in MyHavens.

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)

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.

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.

atmospheric stories

The Atmospheric Railway: New and Selected Stories, by Shena MacKay (2010, Vintage Books, London).

The Atmospheric Railway

The short story starts with Neville on a train. It is a Sunday night in January. Neville is a grandfather in a soft red jumper. He is remembering the weekend, and his adventures into researching the Atmospheric Railway. The adventures are started by the stories of his aunt, Florence. Neville and his sister Beryl only have faint memories of Florence. But they have found out, through her diaries, that there was a potential romance between her and Archie Erskine, who worked on the Atmospheric Railway. Here the train carriages connect, and we are told about Neville's fascination with Archie, and the Railway he worked on.

The reader learns about the various atmospheric or pneumatic railways of England, including Brunel's South Devon Railway, "which cynics referred to as his 'Atmospheric Caper'" (p14)"

"There were frequent break-downs, when third-class passengers had to disembark and push, but the chief problem again was the leather sealing valve, which deteriorated, and was eaten by rats. Constant replacement would have proved too costly. Neville realised that he was just a dilettante and that there existed a cyber community of troglodytes who were experts in the lost tunnels and rivers of England, subterranean trolls and elves inhabiting the ghostly pumping stations and engine houses of south London" (p14).

There is a reference to an excursion that Florence took on the Atmospheric Railway with her students:

"It cost sixpence a ride and she must have paid from her own pocket, Beryl said. Neville had not read it het but was looking forward to Beryl's photocopied version. The railway, propelled by a steam engine coupled to a fan 22 feet in diameter, ran through a tunnel 600 yards in length and 10 feet in diameter. The tunnel gradient was 1 in 15 inches, with a sharp curve ... There were thirty-five seats in the Atmospheric Railway's coach ... All the passengers must have shared the excitement, united in the democracy of novelty as they travelled into the scientific future" (p18).

Not everyone was travelling into the future though. In the story we read of male passengers who were left behind on the platform after they had got out to push flailing railcars. The story ends when the guard of Neville's train is also nearly left behind.

Image from Wikipedia.