the pneumatic adventures of a mouse

My dad is writing comic books for his grandchildren and sending them in installments as quarantine entertainment. In the most recent one, "The Aquatic Adventures of Jooles the Mouse", Jooles lives in an old theatre in London, and rides the pneumatic tube around the building ...

buying bitcoins

It might be the biggest bubble in history, but one thing is for sure, it is hard to avoid talk about cryptocurrency at the moment.

How to buy the magic coins? Pneumatic tube!

This is an except from one of my favourite podcasts, Gimlet's Reply All (dubbed by The Guardian as “‘A podcast about the internet’ that is actually an unfailingly original exploration of modern life and how to survive it.), from the most recent episode no. 115 called The Bitcoin Hunter, where the hosts of the show attempt to track down Jia's lost bitcoins.

LEX: So, can you explain to me, to the best of your memory, like exactly the process of buying the bitcoin and then buying the drugs?

JIA: Yes, OK. Uh, there are gonna be big holes here. (laughs)
ALEX: (laughs)
JIA: OK. So I downloaded Tor…
And then I looked at the Silk Road, and I said, “OK, I’m gonna try and get some bitcoin and make an account and do this.”
And then I remember taking my boyfriend’s car to the Bank of America drive through, putting like, you know, what I think might have been $80, in a little pneumatic tube, it getting sucked up the pneumatic tube—
ALEX: Wait a minute, you deposited money–
JIA: Yeah.
ALEX: Cash, American, US dollars.
JIA: Absolutely, absolutely.
ALEX: Via pneumatic tube–
JIA: Yeah, yeah I did.
ALEX: At a normal bank–
JIA: Yeah, is that? I think that’s what I was supposed to do.  

ALEX: I think that was actually just her putting money in her bank account. Either way, she goes home, gets on the internet, just like, the regular internet, not the dark web, and she goes to this thing called a bitcoin exchange, think of it as a bank.

Head to the link above to listen to the rest of the podcasts, it is truly fascinating stuff ...

Bank drive thru pneumatic tube image from Derek Dysar's Flickr account, used under the Creative Commons lisence.

starring pneumatic tubes

It's been months since I've blogged, a new baby as an excuse, but there are so many exciting pneumatic tube happenings at the moment, I need to steal some time to get back here while my little one sleeps...

First, Logan Lucky. It's the movie we've all been waiting for, one where pneumatic tubes take a long-deserved central role.

Two brothers plan the heist of a lifetime, attempting to make the steal during a car race. Where is the money? In the tubes of course.

The movie promises to be great fun, with loads of pneumatic tubes judging from the trailer. The screenwriter Rebecca Blunt was inspired to use pneumatic tubes from her childhood fascination with the tubes in drive-thru banks.

It's coming to cinemas in only a few weeks. For those who haven't seen the preview, you can watch it here.

Reviews so far are good! Will report back after seeing it.

And thanks so much to the poster on my website for alerting me to this months ago.

posting wishes into the abyss

The London Design Biennale, the first ever, took place over a few weeks at Somerset House last month and lucky visitors were be invited to meet a rather special series of pneumatic tubes. The theme was "Utopia by Design" and what better example of this than the beautifully dystopian/utopian pneumatic tube system.

Archinect reports on Turkey's contribution, the installation in the Biennale of The Wish Machine, by Istanbul based Autoban: a tunnel made of transparent hexagonal pneumatic tubes. The tubes are situated in a mirrored space, amplifying the effect of the multiple passages of the messages that are passing through. Visitors have a chance to write their own notes, their own hopes and wishes for a utopian future and feeding them into the Wish machine. Just like throwing coins into a wishing well, the final destination of these notes will remain a mystery.

The website reports that the installation was "inspired by the cultural tradition of threading a note or momento to the branch of a tree as an act of hope born out of hopelessness".

Thanks to Jess for first letting me know about this!

Unfortunately I cannot find any images from the exhibition which are free to share (please let me know if you have any!). There are however lots of great images on the online platform Archinect, as well as De Zeen.

The installation was at the Design Biennale 7th to 27th September 2016.

shoe tubes

I bought my first pair of Nikes when they started knitting them. But I would have bought a pair earlier if I had known they would have been delivered by "shoe tubes"!

Read more here in the Baltimore Sun.

Thanks once again for another wonderful pneumatic tube tip Patryk! Image of shoe tubes in Niketown from Honolulu Star article.

slow speed

Pneumatic tubes and pneumatic-tube inspired trains such as the Hyperloop are often all about speed and efficiency. Since the invention of trains, designers have wanted them to go faster and faster. There is a photoessay on these fast trains for those interested here.

But fast is not always best. Germany's new ICE trains are in fact slower than the predecessors, but more energy efficient. Slower trains also made me think of an unforgettable trip from Tokyo to Sapporo on the slow, overnight train, Hokutosei.

My husband and I bought the last sleeper tickets available when we arrived in Tokyo, the transaction seemingly impossible from Melbourne. The gorgeous midnight blue train with golden trim was waiting patiently at the station the day of our departure. We had to make our way through a little collection of train enthusiasts, long lens cameras in hand, to board. Inside we found curtained windows, wooden finishes and banker's lights at the restaurant tables, where we sipped on cherry liqueurs and watched the night go by.

I know it is not about pneumatic tubes, but sometimes it is just nice to travel in the slow lane for a while, rather than be speeding and whizzing along, with those capsules.

p.S. I just found out that the Hokutosei is one of those treasures and joys of travel which have disappeared, the line discontinued in August last year.

Photos my own.

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.

Lapsed London history

I can highly recommend a new article on pneumatic tubes which has appeared recently on the slickly designed Lapsed Historian website. Written by a transportoholic and history lover known as Long Branch Mike, the article entitled Get Them on the Blower traces the history of postal pneumatic tubes in London. Rich in historical detail and imagery, the article is also filled with a physical sense of the materiality of the tubes in the 19th century, with stories of experiments in making them of leather, felt, vulcanised fibre, celluloid, alluminium, brass and finally plastic with felt or leather lining. There is a lot of new material for those already familiar with pneumatic tube systems and some novel links to other fascinating kinds of tubes such as speaking tubes (see below) and voice pipes.

Reader's interested in London's pneumatic tube transport systems may be interested in Ian Steadman's article in The New Statesman.

Speaking tubes image from Wikipedia. See also the following website for a comprehensive account of speaking tubes and voicepipes: http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/COMMS/voicepipe/voicepipe.htm

belated christmas post

Sometimes Christmas cards come a little late in the mail. Maybe the cards were left on the coffee table in the rush to fill stockings. Or maybe they got held up as postal systems struggled against the tides of envelopes filled with glitter and Amazon packages being urgently delivered.



This is a piece of Christmas mail that was never sent, waiting in my drafts folder for Christmas week but lost in the rush. But, like all mail, better late than never! So a little bit of Christmas for your January, a gorgeous steampunk way for Santa to get around the globe (courtesy of Core.2 in their comments on a pneumatic tube Gizmodo article).

pneumatic correspondence of note

The writers Franz Kafka and Max Brod were great friends. When Kafka died, it was Brod who ignored his request to burn Kafka's life's work, and had them published instead. The two communicated often, including by pneumatic post:

An instant message of its time, Franz was to meet Max with his interesting cousin that evening. A Paraguayan in Prague, and no doubt a lively evening ahead.

Note published in the book of Franz Kafka's correspondence entitled: Letters to Friends, Family and Editors (published 1977).

tubes fit for a king

My favourite pneumatic tube spotter just sent me a preview for Kingsman: The Secret Service. Is that a luxurious pneumatic tube transporter hidden there?

no longer the dead centre of town: pneumatic burials

Whenever we would drive past a cemetery on family roadtrips, my dad would often point out the window and say "there is the dead centre of town".

What happens though when cities get so big that they have to start burying their dead outside them, for reasons of space and hygiene? This was a problem that faced Vienna in the late 19th Century, and so a new cemetery, the Zentralfriedhof, or Central Cemetery, was built on the city's outskirts. There was a problem though with this new arrangement - being almost 9km out of town, how to transport those who had died to this new burial site?

Initially transport relied on horse-drawn cart. In poor weather, especially snow, this led to all kinds of chaos however, with coffins sometimes left in taverns along the way. Another solution had to be found. And so the engineer  Franz von Felbinger and architect Josef Hudetz came up with the ingenious plan of pneumatic corpse transportation.

Published as Begräbnishalle mit pneumatischer Förderung für den Centralfriedhof der Stadt Wien, the proposal was as follows, as reported in Scientific American on October 3rd 1874 (and summarised in the Otago Witness February 13th 1875):

It is proposed to erect a grand monumental hall or temple, which is to be divided into three portions, a middle hall and two smaller ones, the former to be devoted to the use of Roman Catholics, and the latter respectively to Protestants and Israelites. These apartments will be subdivided into chapels suitably furnished and decorated.

On a funeral taking place, the body in its coffin will be deposited in a sarcophagus in the centre of one of the chapels, and the ceremony proceeded with. At the conclusion, the chief mourner touches a spring, when the sarcophagus sinks noiselessly through the floor. This corresponds to the public burial, as far as the mourners are concerned, they have nothing further to do with the body. On its arrival, however, in the cellar, men stationed for the purpose attach a check to the bier, showing to which cemetery it is to be forwarded, and place the body, with three others, in an iron car which fits in a subterranean tube, running on trucks placed therein, after the plan described by us as followed in the construction of the experimental section of the pneumatic railway under Broadway in this City. This tunnel in Vienna will be 15,000 feet long, and the carriages will be propelled through its entire length, by means of a blast of compressed air, in about ten minutes.

The incredible pneumatic burial plan was never realised, reportedly due to technical problems and "issues of peity". Corpses were eventually transported to the cemetery by tramline in the early 20th century, then motorised hearse.

This is an intriguing chapter in the story of people moving by pneumatic tube, which raises many interesting questions: What were the issues of peity, that worked against the proposal? How much did the Viennese public know of these plans, and what did they think of them? It is fascinating that the religions were separated above ground, yet bodies were propelled through the tunnel together - or were they to be differentiated here too, with separate religious tracks or trolleys  in the system? The notion of the noiseless sinking into the subterranean tube correlating with a public burial is also intriguing.

From what I can find, there seems little written about the plans in English (although see references below). I do know that the researcher Florian Bettel, from the Universität Mozarteum Salzburg has written on the topic in German, for those who are interested, and for those interested in pneumatic systems in Vienna more generally, you may find the publication below, in English and German, a good read (if you can find a copy to buy online).

Information for this post obtained from Vienna: A Cultural History by Nicholas Parsons and Vienna: A Doctor's Guide by Wolfgang Regal and Michael Nanut. For more information about the pneumatic postal system in Vienna see The Pneumatic Post in Vienna by Colin Tobitt and Andy Taylor, published in English in 2005. Image of patent for "Method of preserving dead bodies" from Atlas Obscura.

youtube and the tubes

YouTube is a great place to find lots of material about another kind of tube; the pneumatic kind. This week an article I wrote with Susan Kelly and Sally Wyatt called "Autobiologies on YouTube: Narratives of direct-to-consumer genetic testing" was published online, in New Genetics & Society. You can find the article here, and if you don't have online library access to the journal, a post-print version on my academia.edu page here.

For those with a good internet connection, the website is now a taken-for-granted way of uploading and watching videos posted by users of all different kinds for a range of reasons. YouTube is only beginning to interest social scientists, who are starting to explore the ways in which people engage with the media. I am starting to think about how this platform is used by those using, making, playing with pneumatic tubes. Initial searches for pneumatic tube systems on YouTube bring up many promotional videos, alongside cartoon segments, computer game tips, DIY systems and my favourite, tubecam videos. Here are a list of a few of my favourites so far (see also previous blogposts about pneumatic tube on YouTube here, here, here and here):

The Smithsonian Museum has uploaded some great historical footage of the Philadelphia Post Office.

Stanford Medicine video including spliced tubecam and footage of a canister being sent and received.

Molly Wright Steenson's Ignite presentation.

I'd love to hear if you have any other others to recommend.

Image from the Smithsonian YouTube. Thanks to Thomas for some of these links.

wolves use tubes on wall street

At the movies the other night, watching Wolf of Wall Street. It's Jordan Belfort's first day as a stock broker, the beginnings of his infamous career. He is being shown around the place by Mark Hanna. Hanna is on the phone, makes a sale: "Done! Time to paint the tape! Wooh! A two thousand Microsoft goin' in the hole!". And there goes the ticket into the pneumatic tube. "It's alive, it's alive. Hold on to that, it's hot" Hanna yells. Jordan takes the capsule and opens up the door to the pneumatic tube system. "In in" Hanna urges. Jordan closes the door and it is off. "Sold!" Hanna exclaims!

This movie scene draws from Belfort's memoirs (an excerpt of which was published in Newsweek) of his first impressions of the chaos of Wall Street. He talks of pandemonium - buzzers and loudspeakers and shouting (the roar of the mob), sounds he writes he knew he'd never forget for they were the sounds of greed and ambition, which would come to define his own life. He describes the role that the tubes had to play in this chaos:

Every so often a broker would slam his phone down in victory and then fill out a buy ticket and walk over to a pneumatic tubing system that had been affixed to a support column. He would stick the ticket in a glass cylinder and watch it get sucked up into the ceiling. From there, the ticket made its way to the trading desk on the other side of the building, where it would be rerouted to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for execution. So the ceiling had been lowered to make room for the tubing, and it seemed to bear down on my head. 

He was so smooth on the phone that it literally boggled my mind. It was as if he were apologizing to his clients as he ripped their eyeballs out. 'Sir, let me say this,' ... Two minutes later Mark was at the tubing system with a quartermillion-dollar buy order for a stock called Microsoft. I’d never heard of Microsoft before, but it sounded like a pretty decent company. Anyway, Mark’s commission on the trade was $3,000. I had seven dollars in my pocket.

Not for long.

Use of pneumatic tubes on the stock exchange dates back to the 1920. The scene above, set in 1987, must be describing one of the last remnants of the pneumatic tube system on Wall Street, as according to A Financial History of the United States, by the mid- 1960s Wall Street firms were gradually replacing pneumatic systems with computerised systems. Although only a very brief moment in the movie, according to New York Arts, Scorsese did some painstaking research into the function of pneumatic tubes, for his historical portrayal of the stock exchange in the 1980s.

Movie quotes from moviequotesandmore.

radio day

It is that time of the week for some pneumatic distraction. A good old fashioned radio show this time. Via soundcloud you can listen to Roman Mars interview Molly Steenson about pneumatic tubes on the San Francisco radio show dedicated to design, architecture and the built environment, 99% Invisible. It is a great radio documentary on the topic, with sound recordings of tubes, sitcoms and trash disposal.



In the show Molly Steenson ponders on why pneumatic tubes are so magical and suggests that they inspire wonder because they feel as if they are alive, extending breathing electrical tentacles through the city. They feel a lot bigger than we are she further suggests and most romantic of all, if you scent a handkerchief through the tubes, it would still smell like you.

hacking into the system

Standing out amidst the 3D printers and other technological gadgets, pneumatic tubes made a splash at the Chaos Communication Congress held recently in Hamburg. WIRED's article, How to send Estonian Vodka through the Pneumatic Internet reported on the Intertubular Pneumatic Packet Distribution System which was installed by hackers in the conference centre.

This system was inspired by the Octo project which I have reported on previously (above), which in turn was inspired by the Rohrposts of the past. "Occasionally emitting a buzz as something whizzed overhead", the Hamburg system had 15 switching points, creating a network of glowing capsules which no doubt kept hackers amused during more intense discussions of terrorist surveillance.

Image of Octo used with permission from the PNEUMAtic circUS Flikr page

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 factory tour part two: the workshop

I arrive at the Hörtig pneumatic tube factory on a hot day in June. The factory is in the outskirts of the German city of Bayreuth, which I reach by meandering past the city's opera houses and gardens. After waiting for several trucks to pass in the factory driveway, laden with tubing, I enter the building. I then meet Martin, the owner of the company, and my warm host for the morning, Karin.

Karin works in quality assurance, a job she tells me about over a hot chocolate, in the staff kitchen and dining area. After I finish my drink, Karin takes me on a tour of the factory. We enter the factory floor first of all. There is a quiet, subdued sense of industrious work in the workshop, with the faint sound of a saw or drill coming from a nearby room. A smell of grease or oil gets stronger as we step further into the workshop.

At one bench, a man sits painting parts of tubing with grey paint, using a small paintbrush. He works by himself, and has about ten parts in front of him. Behind him there is a large wall of little drawers of hardware; screws and other pieces needed to assemble the tubes, all neatly labelled and ordered.

Karin and I head further into the workshop, passing apprentices at various workstations, working with electrical parts, learning their craft. In a glassed-off room a large machine methodically cuts out pieces of grey plastic - perhaps this is the sound I heard earlier. The room is very neat, all the tools arranged carefully.

It is a privilege to be allowed access into the heart of this pneumatic tube factory, to be allowed into the workshop, and see the German craftsmen at work. There is a lot to take in, the sounds, smells and sights of the tubes being built, by machines and by men. There is a craft tradition here I am only vaguely aware of, and techniques and tools that I do not understand. Yet already this tour is telling more more about pneumatic tubes than I could have imagined. The next blogpost will take you further into the factory, this time to the testing room floor.

All images my own.

conference in a box

Knowledge in a Box - How Mundane Things Shape Knowledge Production

Venue; Kavala, Greece

Municipal Tobacco Warehouse-Tobacco Worker Square (Dimotiki Kapnapothiki-Plateia Kapnergati)

Some highlights from a conference for lovers of boxes, tubes, packages and other everyday objects ....

Thursday 26 July 2012 

9:30-10:00 Cheng, Yi-Ping. Lancaster University 
The Flow and Storage of Things in Taiwanese’s Households: Things and Their Containers 

12:30-13:00 Goff, Alice. University of California, Berkeley 
Containing the Trees: The Schildbach Wood Library and the Eighteenth Century Box 

Friday, 27 July 2012 

13:00-13:30 Hammel, Tanja. University of Basel 
Botanical Knowledge in a Parcel 

13:30-14:00 Pettersson, Ylwa and Kandastar, Razia Asad. Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala 
The Travels of Folke Linder: As Traced by his Microscope Box 

Saturday, 28 July 2012 

11:00-11:30 Mechler, Ulrich. Medizin und Pharmaziehistorische Sammlung Uni Kiel 
Lymph Nodes in Folders – an Experimental System in Pathological Borderlands 

12:30-13:00 Rentetzi, Maria. National Technical University of Athens 
Calibrating Radiotherapy Equipment: Sending TLD’s in Postal Boxes 

Sunday, 29 July 2012 

11:30-12:00 Ma, Li. Nesna University College, Norway 
From Tokens in Envelopes to Clay Tablets: On The Early development of Writing, Counting and Mathematics 

For more information see:

http://knowledgeinabox.ntua.gr

Local contact: Maria Rentetzi, mrentetz@vt.edu

Image from askpang's Flikr page.