seidenstrasse

While fascinating technologies such as Hyperface, Adam Harvey's countersurveillance project, are making recent news, another project from the Chaos Community Congress from a previous year may also be of interest to Rohrpost-Nerds.

The 303C in 2013 saw the installation of the Seidenstrasse, the congress pneumatic tube system. Inspired by the OCTO installation at the 2013 transmediale festival, which I wrote about here, the Seidenstrasse was installed in the main congress building, using 2 kilometers of tubing. In the lead up to the event, participants were instructed as follows:

Without YOUR capsules Seidenstrasse cannot work – bring one, two, many! Lighting is mandatory, since it makes debugging much easier in case a capsule gets stuck. The possibilities range from capsules made from plastic bottles (cheap and simple) to 3D printed or encrypted capsules. Old vacuum cleaners, leaf blowers and the like are also welcome – please remember to build some kind of noise isolation if you bring a device for blowing or vacuuming ...

For the whole thing to be fun, creative hacker solutions and wild love of experimentation are needed. Some hackerspaces, including Chaos inKL. in Kaiserslautern, Raumfahrtagentur in Berlin, or the protolab in Kleinmachnow are already hacking and making. There are still a lot of unsolved problems left though, waiting for a smart hack: For example solutions for crossing fire emergency doors, which can not be blocked by pipes. The capsules could at these places e.g. fly through the air and be vacuumed in again, or be transported by human or robotic messengers.

Installations for (semi) automatic capsule routing would be rad, or installation details for the switching nodes, or solutions for hanging the pipes at the ceiling, or concepts for Onion Routing, Hidden Servides and so on. Also still missing are capsule counters for network traffic analysis (for the SOC report on day 4).

For this we hope for broad participation by the Chaos family and hacker spaces. You have always wanted a pneumatic post system between the rooms of your space, right? :-)

If anyone who reads this post was at the congress and even sent off a capsule, I would love to hear what it was like!

You can read more about the Silk Road experiment on the Chaos Computer Club website here.

Thanks very much to Thomas for telling me about Hyperface, and Stefan for sending me the links for the Seidenstrasse.

Stefan also sent me a link to a German blogpost by Leitmedium about the Rohrpost exhibit in the communications museum in Berlin, which German speakers and readers may be interested in. You can read it here.


Image used under the Creative Commons licence from Robert Anders' Flikr photostream.

pneumatic tubes on TV: the beginnings of a list

I love lists. Making them, ticking things off them. So its time for another pneumatic tube list. We've already had the list of pneumatic tubes in literature and a list of pneumatic tubes in film. Now for a list of TV shows, where pneumatic tubes make an appearance:

Fantasy Island

Futurama

Hallo Spencer

The Jetsons

Lost

The Simpsons

Please let me know if there is anything missing!

There will be more posts about some of these shows coming up. In the meantime, you can entertain yourself with clips of The Jetsons, Lost or Hallo Spencer.

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

cabaret capsules

In an extravagant dancehall in Berlin, amidst water features, dance floors and big bands, it was once possible to send notes and gifts (there was a menu of 135 gifts you could send) to fellow revellers by pneumatic post. Somewhat more romantic than the pneumatic delivery of burgers and chips that I wrote about last week, the Resi Rohrpost seems to have been the making of one or two liaisons, fuelled by German wines and jazz.

In response to a recent blogpost in Cabaret Berlin about The Resi, a series of war veterans comment about their fond memories of the dancehall and their pneumatic encounters. One Army Lieutenant exchanged messages in 1956 which he still had in his possession - notes from table 448 to table 482 for example, between the Lieutenant and Blue Color, whom he danced with that night. Another visitor to the dancehall met a "beautiful German lady" who had sent him a note by the tube asking him to rescue her from a blind date.

Coincidentally I happened to be reading Ian McEwan's book The Innocent when I read this blogpost, which has a passage where the protagonist visits a nightclub in Berlin with other British servicemen. There is a wonderful scene which takes place in what I now realise is The Resi. Leonard has descended with a few others via a small lift into the then dark bar, with its grand unlit chandeliers and gilt-framed mirrors. Over Russian champagne, the story's protagonist reads a pamphlet attached to the menu, written in "clumsy print that swayed and danced". The pamphlet welcomed visitors to the Ballhouse of technical wonders, with "Modern Table-Phone-System" and "Pneumatic-Table-Mail-Service", posting "every night thousands of letters or little presents from one visitor to another" (pp 33-34). Soon Leonard receives a message of his own (pp35 -36):

As the mermaid shimmered to the front of the band and the cheers rung out there was a harsh rattling at their table as a canister shot down the tube and smacked against the brass fixture and lodge there. They stared at it and no one moved. 

Then Glass picked it up and unscrewed the top. He took out a folded piece of paper and spread it out on the table. 'My God, ' he shouted, 'Leonard, it's for you.' 

For one confused moment he thought it might be from his mother. He was owed a letter from England. And it was late, he thought, he hadn't said where he was going to be. 

The three of them were leaning over the note. Their heads were blocking out the light. Russel read it aloud. 'An den jungen Mann mit der Blume in Haar.' To the young man with the flower in his hair. 'Mein Schoner, I have been watching you from my table. I would like it if you come and asked me to dance. But if you can't do this, I would be so happy if you would turn and smile in my direction. I am sorry to interfere, yours, table number 89'.

Romance blossoms between the woman at table 89, Maria, and Leonard - later on they return to The Resi and drink Sekt to toast their first meeting - Maria wants to sit apart and send messages through the pneumatic tube, but there are no vacant tables. They have a second bottle of Sekt.

Built in 1908, The Resi was in its heyday in the 1920s. The venue closed in 1939 but was recreated in 1951, rohrpoststation and all - it is this recreation that Leonard visited. Sadly the building was closed and demolished in 1978.

Image from Cabaret Berlin. See also a great postcard from The Resi on the Buispost site.

the small world of pneumatics

As weird geographical chance would have it, I just happened to be two offices down from Christine, whose family owns a pneumatic tube system company in Germany.

The company is called HÖRTIG rohrpost, and is based in Bayreuth. They have been installing pneumatic tubes since the 1960s, into a variety of places such as hospitals, supermarkets, pharmacies and cinemas. Each system is tailor-made for its location, using innovative technologies. One of their latest developments is the CargoPlus model which has a diameter of 500mm and can take material up to 50kg. The company are also taking part in a project regarding the underground movement of cargo, while also expanding their horizons to China and other Asian countries.


The company showcases their work at various trade fairs, which Christine told me she remembered attending when she was younger, where they have elaborate displays, with tubing hanging from scaffolding. I hope to speak with other members of this family-run business in the future, find out more about how their systems are being tailored for hospitals and other buildings, in Europe and in Asia, and maybe even attend a trade fair to see this stall and learn more about this fascinating industry.

Images of a hospital system and tube with an X-Ray from the company website.

pneumatic tube correspondence of the week 4

via Berlin Rohrpost

Image from wikipedia.

signs of tubes in berlin

As I mentioned in a previous post, I visited Berlin recently and was looking out for signs of the rorhpost. Here is a glimpse I found in the Museum für Kommunikation Berlin:

Like in the museum, the tubes are fairly hidden, and take a little bit of searching out, but there they are all along ...

the last letter

I saw this letter, sent via rohrpost, at the Jewish Museum in Berlin last month.

Here is the tragic story of this piece of mail, transcribed from the museum text:

"Martha Liebermann, the aging widow of painter Max Liebermann, who died in 1935, wrote this letter to a family friend on March 4, 1943: "Dear esteemed Mr. Alenfeld, I am totally flustered! The bank did not even pay the small amount I requested. Were it not for a friendly visit, I would not have any money at all! Worse still, everyone is frightening me with their talk of deportation! I eagerly await your arrival ... Please, please answer me, gratefully yours, Martha L."

But Erich Alenfeld arrived too late. Just before Martha Liebermann was to be taken from her apartment the next morning, she took an overdose of the barbiturate Veronal"

pneumatic tube correspondence of the week 2

via München Rohrpost ...

Image from Wikipedia.

pneumatic tube correspondence of the week 1

via Hamburg Rohrpost ...

Image from Wikipedia.

wiki who?

For a long time Wikipedia has been treated by academics with some scorn, lecturers crossing out students' Wikipedia references in essays with enthusiastic relish. It seems as if it is becoming increasingly difficult however for even these tireless teachers to deny the ubiquitous nature of Wikipedia in our lives. Nonetheless, academics, scientists and other 'experts' still contribute very little to this project ... and Wikimedia wants to find out why, in this anonymous survey (with more background here).

In my field, Science and Technology Studies, there has been much dismantling of the boundaries of expertise, and questioning of the kinds of categories that Wikimedia is using to distinguish between contributors. Even so, their survey raises the interesting subject of who contributes to Wikipedia, from where, why, and so forth. This is a topic which the Digital Methods Initiative in Amsterdam is studying with vigor (for example see this project about Wikipedia as a place of controversy), and the topic of an upcoming paper I am looking forward to by René König at the Participatory Knowledge Production 2.0 workshop at Maastricht University.

So I wonder, who contributes to the Wikipedia entry about Pneumatic Tube systems? What are their motivations, their connections, their interests? What sources are they drawing from? Why are some images included and not others? Why is the popular culture section much longer than the historical section? Have you contributed to this page? If so why, and if not, why not?

Stereoscopic image by Prof.Dr. Nemo Klein.Gelegenheitsbenutzer at de.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons.

pneumatic post map of the week 8

Rohrpost Berlin 1928

Image from Rice University Rohrpost site.

pneumatic tube map of the week 7

Rohrpost Reichsbank 1927-28

Map from Wikipedia.

pneumatic tube map of the week 5

Rohrpost Berlin 1873

Image from Wikipedia.

pneumatic tube map of the week 3

Rohrpost Berlin 1885

Map from Wikipedia via Synccity