In the house

Annabel Crabb hosts, along with Leigh Sales, one of my favourite podcasts Looks 10 Chat 3. She also hosts the TV show called "The House", about Parliament House in Australia, which shows, to quote her in ABC:

"the manic behind-the-scenes activity among attendants corralling amendments as they are drafted and debated, and using the Willy Wonka-esque Lamson Tube, a pneumatic message chute, to ping amendments back to the Senate Table Office."

Check out one or both this Christmas. Thanks to my father-in-law Trevor for sending the newspaper cut out about the show.

Happy holidays!!

Congressional records

While there is a lot going on at the moment with the Hyperloop including new routes announced around the world, carving up the world map like a big Ticket to Ride board (I can see the Hyperloop boardgame already), more funding and Richard Branson joining the scene, in coming posts I want to look at where pneumatic tubes have been appearing lately in other news.

As I start winter with old episodes of West Wing, sent to me in the post on DVD by my mum, a good place to start is the Library of Congress Book Tunnel, which Atlas Obscura recently showcased. The building opened to the public in 1898 and it soon became clear that there was the:

Serious question how some senator, for instance, in the heat of a fiery debate on the floor, could in the shortest space of time get to his hand some particular volume whose authority would unhorse his antagonist - a volume nestled, perhaps, deep in the shelves of the library, a quarter of a mile away.

Pneumatic tubes were the answer, thanks to the Miles Pneumatic Tube Company. Requests for the documents would be sent via tube, and then the texts whisked back. As Obscura write, "this whole literary orchestra took just five minutes, likely less time than it would take your average contemporary congressman to pull up an arcane PDF through LOC.gov."

Alas, a century later the pneumatic system closed down, although apparently a tunnel remains where you can still see librarians wheeling those old-fashioned things called books around on carts.

You can read more about the system on the Library of Congress' blog.

Image of Library of Congress pneumatic tube system from ep_jhu's Flickr album, used under the creative common licence.

secret parliament tunnels

Canberra, the capital city of my home country Australia, has a reputation for orderly design. This is not only in the carefully orchestrated public spaces and streets above ground, but below ground too. Recently, the curious ABC Canberra reporters Sonya Gee and Matthew Arnaudon went searching for Canberra's secret underground spaces and found traces of the old parliamentary pneumatic tubes.

The tubes connected Parliament House and Defence, as a safe and secure way to transport important documents. The curious reporters travel into the underground tunnels where the tubes lie and receive a demonstration of how the tubes worked. You can read more about the canberra tubes and their museum displays in my previous posts, here and here.

Many thanks to the Canberra-based comic illustrator Stuart McMillen for sending me details of this ABC report!

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.