from the point of view of a capsule

Some of you may have already seen a video doing the rounds this week through blogs, where a Go Pro video camera takes a ride through a Norwegian parliament pneumatic tube system:



It's not the first tube cam video, nor will I imagine it being the last. This video differs a little from the previously somewhat clunky smartphone videos which have been posted, giving some sense of not only the dizzying trip through the tubes, kind of like metallic endoscopy footage, but also the stops and starts, the turn arounds and switches. The fact that this is a tube system in parliament is interesting. More about that in upcoming posts. The video offers a glimpse of what we don't normally see: the inside of infrastructure, and the way the movement of objects is organised. We feel the pressure and effects of vacuum. And perhaps even a little about what life is like as a pneumatic tube capsule, whizzing from one station to the next.

For those readers interested in the possibilities of, and social consequences of Go Pro cameras, there is a great New Yorker article on the topic.

winding dizzying putkiposti

I have just finished yet another great Norwegian novel, and one more awaits, freshly picked up from the library. At night I am watching The Bridge, halfway between Sweden and Denmark. Soon I will be in Copenhagen. What can I find out about Scandinavian pneumatic tubes in the meantime?

While pneumatic tube systems do not seem to be as resplendent in Scandinavian cities as they are in other European places, there are still a number of companies situated in this part of the world, such as the Finnish PutkiPosti company Teho Tecknikka, and others in Sweden. At the Kommunikationens Hus, the Post and Tele Museum in Denmark, they had a popular exhibition on pneumatic tubes, where they described them as something between a vacuum cleaner and a postbox. The exhibition summary says that there were no extensive pneumatic networks in Copenhagen, although some buildings did have their own systems, such as Riget Hospital and the Odense University Hospital. Whether these still exist I am not sure. Finally, there is a lovely poetic post (so I gather from Google Translate) by Johanna Eriksson on the Swedish blog [squinch][researching] about pneumatics: "Criss Cross and Around ... A single long water slide ...Where? Already gone. There it was again!".

Image from Teho Tecknikka.
Thanks to BuisPost.eu for the pneumatic post translations.