tubes for children

Now I have a child there is a floor of the library where I am spending a lot more time - the children's section in the basement of our local public library. We mostly go there to borrow board books but I am interested in how a library in St Louis County is attracting children in other ways - through pneumatic tubes.

The Florissant Valley Library have recently renovated their children's section with a wall of pneumatic tubes, I guess to show how book slips or other objects travel. I can't tell from the photos whether children or adults can send things themselves through the tubes, it would be interesting to find out.

There are lots of photos of the renovation, under copyright, at the Library's Flickr page.

Image of Verne's cover from FC8 V5946 869ve, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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.

virtual cabinet of medical materials

There is a new website which might interest those readers of this blog who are fascinated by medical materials: Commonplaces. The website is part of the blog Somatosphere, and describes itself as: "itemizing the technological present: A series of short entries from scholars on the classical and contemporary sites in medicine and science". Their aim? To produce a "collaborative cabinet - on that is less a coherent collection than a series of interruptions in the white noise of the technological present".

Promising entries include: the needle, the patent, the pill, the white coat, the chart and trash. New entries should appear on Mondays. A nice way to start the week!

Photo my own, from fieldwork in Melbourne (Brownless Library).

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.

chutes, stacks and tubes

Moving from the Netherlands to Australia to England during the last few months has not only meant that I haven't been blogging, but also that I haven't been able to maintain a nice library of books to curl up and read over winter. Luckily there are always libraries!

I am a big fan of public libraries in all shapes and forms, including the solemn and silent, the noisy little locals and the slickly designed big nationals. Libraries have all sorts of fun technologies to move books, request slips and other papers around like chutes, conveyer belts and yes, of course, pneumatic tubes.

The New York Humanities and Social Sciences library, and now the New York Science, Industry and Business library have pneumatic systems which allow request slips to be sent deep into the stacks, the books returned on a ferris wheel. In the Law Library in the Library of Congress, there are pneumatic tubes running from the closed stacks to the reading room. Sadly however, some libraries have recently lost their pneumatic systems in the midst of rennovations, such as the St Louis Central Library.

There are so many reasons to love libraries, the amuseument park of chutes, stacks and tubes only adding to the pleasure and importance of these public institutions.

Image of pneumatic tubes still in use at St Louis Public Library, from VanishingSTL's Flikr photostream.

dusty digital archives

Some of you may have been reading texts from the Internet Archive for some time (my brother-in-law sent me a wonderful link to a Kite book several years ago), but I have recently rediscovered this amazing resource after receiving this email in my inbox:

I work with the Medical Heritage Library and I was hoping to be able to bring our resources to the attention of your discussion list by having the MHL included in your list of Web resources. The MHL is a collaboration of major research libraries in the United States, including the Francis A.Countway Library of Medicine, the National Library of Medicine, the Columbia Library of Health Sciences, and the College of Physicians in Philadelphia. We digitize and make available through the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary) a wide range of materials pertaining to the history of medicine, including texts on military medicine, general surgery and surgical history, spiritualism, sanitation, hygiene, tropical medicine, medical jurisprudence, psychology, gynecology, phrenology, crimes, criminology, electrotherapeutics, climatology, and homeopathy. (For a fuller list of topics, go here: http://www.archive.org/browse.php?field=subject&mediatype=texts&collection=medicalheritagelibrary!) -Hanna

Although searching through these archives did not have the same feel as winding up the stacks or dusting off marbled covers, with a few strikes of my keyboard and a couple of clicks I found a treasure of publications about pneumatic tubes.

These time-worn digital books included the facts and general information relating to pneumatic despatch tubes of the Batcheller Pneumatic Tube Co., a report of the Postmaster-general to Congress relative to an inviestigation of pneumatic tubes systems for delivering mail and a brailed, stamped copy of the concise treatment of the principles, methods and applications of pneumatic conveyance.

The Internet Archive is certainly a site to linger and travel back to. In fact you can travel back, way back, in time using the marvellous WayBack Machine, which I have been using for my research. Beware, this is a site to get lost in for hours!

Images from The Pneumatic Despatch Tube System.

not just a big truck

Several days ago, the former US Senator Ted Stevens died in a plane crash in Alaska. A strong opponent of net neutrality, he famously, or infamously referred to the Internet as, not a truck where you dump things, but rather a "series of tubes" (see this excerpt from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart for a send-up and mention of pneumatic tubes - dubbed the information supertube - at the end, or here for a Techno Remix of Stevens' words).

The phrase, "a series of tubes", has been used by many in reference to pneumatic tubes, with links made between this communication/transportation technology and the Internet.

Image by Molly Steenson, taken at the New York Public Library whilst she was researching for her presentation "A Series of Tubes" about pneumatic tubes.

pneumatic tubes in blogosphere

Pneumatic tubes have been the subject of one or two chat forums, and some fantastic blog posts. On the 'In the Public Domain' chat forum, there is a conversation about Stanford Hospital's network, tubes at Denver International airport and some links to YouTube videos. Conversation drifts into science fiction fantasy and high-tech imaginings.

The wonderful Web Urbanist provides extensive coverage on the tubes. The Web Urbanist post has details of Alfred Beach's 19th century pneumatic subway, cash railways, postal systems, steampunk aesthetics and novel uses of the technology in watch stores and coffee houses. The post mentions hospitals too:

When moving small packages quickly from one place to another within a self-contained area, pneumatic tube systems can’t be beat. Indeed, modern tube networks are installed in new hospitals, older systems are added to and original systems just keep on ticking along, as they have very few moving parts to wear out. Hospitals are ideal locations for tube systems; they move medical samples from one area to another quickly – and in hospitals, speed can save lives.

And finally, for today's post, there is Curious Expedition's Pneu York, Pneu York, which has snippets about a cat flying through the New York postal network and stories of how employees of the Waldorf-Astoria used their system for gossip. The post describes how many of New York's pneumatic tube systems were dismantled in the 20th century, except for the NY Humanities and Social Sciences library, where book requests are sent down to the stacks, seven floors below the ground, via pneumatics, with the books then appearing on an oval ferris wheel. Finally, there is the tale of pneumatic tube system vs bicycle in Prague:

“We had a race once between us, a bicycle courier, and a dispatch van to see who could get an identical parcel to [Czech President Vaclav] Havel up at the castle,” recalls Jiri Lilling, one of nine engineers who maintain the pneumatic network. “It was rush hour, so the van took an hour. The bicycle took 25 minutes. But our parcel was there in 4 minutes.”

Image via Curious Expeditions.

my medical museum

The My Medical Museum competition has recently closed. I enjoyed looking at the other entries, which included several videos, and there are many of these museums that I would love to visit one day. Here is my entry for the competition:

I’ve always loved medical libraries, probably because I have spent over a decade studying in them. There are constant sources of distraction in medical libraries: the latest scientific journals; microbiology textbooks with exquisite photographs; anatomical texts filled with woodcuts and engravings. The library in my medical school in Tasmania, Australia was a rather modest affair but when I moved to the University of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia I found something much larger. My new medical library had multiple levels, rare old books, new computers and the most wonderful distraction of all: a medical museum.

Gradually, over the years, the Medical History Museum at the University of Melbourne has become more than a distraction, and since March this year I have been volunteering there every Thursday afternoon. I share a computer and little office with Ann (another staff member), an operating table, anaesthetic equipment and hundreds of locked and labelled wooden boxes. It is dusty and cluttered and I love it!

The museum was established in the library in 1967, with a grant from the Wellcome Trust. A beautiful 19^th century Savory and Moore pharmacy, shipped from Belgravia, London, is installed in the museum, complete with bottles and gold-labelled herb drawers. On display there are also microscopes, amputation sets and bleeding equipment, in walnut display cases. Currently there is a temporary exhibition about apothecaries -The Physick Gardener: Aspects of an Apothecary's World - curated by the museum’s new curator Susie Shears. Behind a hidden door in the pharmacy are the curator’s offices and storage areas, where chests and drawers may contain pathological slides or stapleguns, and shelves are filled with boxes, books and ephemera.

There are many treasured items in the museum’s collection including specie jars, pill rolling machines and medicine chests used by doctors during visits to rural areas in Australia. One of the oldest photographs (1864), and one of my favourites, depicts the first medical students carrying out work in the Anatomy Dissecting Room, under the supervision of Professor Halford, and the watchful gaze of the medical school porter.

Professor George Britton Halford (1824 – 1910) was a lecturer in London, before taking the first chair of anatomy, physiology and pathology at the University of Melbourne. He moved to the antipodes with anatomical and pathological specimens he had collected for a museum, and books to start a library. His first practical classes and lectures were held in the converted coach-house of his private residence, before moving to the newly completed medical school in 1864.

Professor Halford played an important role in the teaching and administration of the new medical school in Melbourne, and was a strong advocate for female students. He arrived in Melbourne with an established record as a researcher (one of his most important essays being The Action and Sounds of the Heart: A Physiological Essay (1860)) but his later controversial experiments with snake venom damaged this reputation.

The objects and documents I found associated with Halford provide a window not only into the life of a contentious researcher and teacher, but also into the collection of the Medical History Museum. Amongst Halford’s material objects and paper artefacts, there is: a Powell and Lealand compound monocular and binocular microscope stored in a walnut case with a handwritten inventory; a cabinet of microscope slides commercially and handmade between 1860 and 1889; a paper entitled ‘On a Remarkable Symmetrically Deformed Skeleton’ (1868); photographs of the professor and his family; and his business card.

Other pieces in the collection associated with Halford include a student’s set of lecture notes compiled during Professor Halford’s anatomy and physiology lectures throughout 1877. This leather bound exercise book, with John Springthorpe’s scribblings and coloured pencil illustrations, is the only surviving example of Professor Halford’s teaching.

All of these objects are material remnants of Professor Halford’s time at the University of Melbourne. They are microscopic slices of a time when medical students wore aprons and dissected on wooden tables and when slides were handmade. The objects are portals into the past that overlap with my curiosity of the future. They are just some of the thousands of wonderful stories to be found in my medical museum.

All photographs are my own except for the anatomy class which was included with the kind permission of Susie Shears, Medical History Museum, University of Melbourne.

pneumatic tubes in literature 3

Adam Walker describes his job one summer as a page at Butler Library on the Columbia campus in New York:

"Shelving expeditions eat up approximately half your day. The other half is spent sitting behind a small desk on one of the upper floors, waiting for a pneumatic tube to come flying up through the intestines of the building with a withdrawal slip commanding you to retrieve this or that book for the student or professor who has just asked for it below. The pneumatic tube makes a distinctive, clattering noise as it speeds upwards towards its destination, and you can hear it from the moment it begins its ascent. The stacks are distributed among several floors, and since you are just one of several pages sitting at desks on those several floors, you don't know if the pneumatic tube with the withdrawal slip rolled up inside it is headed for you or one of your colleagues. You don't find out until the last second, but if it is indeed meant for you, the metallic cylinder comes bursting out of an opening in the wall behind you and lands in the box with a propulsive thud, which instantly triggers a mechanism that turns on the forty or fifty red lightbulbs that line the ceiling from one end of the floor to the other. The lights are essential, for it often happens that you are away from your desk when the tube arrives, in the process of searching for another book, and when you see the lights go on you are alerted to the fact that a new order has just come in. If you are not away from your desk, you pull the withdrawal slip out of the tube, go off to find the book or books that are wanted, return to your desk, tuck the withdrawal slops into the books (making sure that the top portion is sticking out a couple of inches), load the books into the dumbwaiter in the wall behind your desk, and push the button for the second floor. To top off the operation, you return the empty tube by squeezing it into a little hole in the wall. You hear a pleasant whoosh as the cylinder is sucked into the vacuum, and more often than not you will go on standing there for a moment, following the sound of the clattering missile as it plunges through the pipe on its way downstairs. Then you return to your desk. You settle into your chair. You sit and wait for the next order"

From Invisible by Paul Auster, p103 - 104
(ear-marked by Thomas)