library's keynote

In a delightful essay on pneumatic tubes accessible from the media studies scholar Shannon Mattern's website, she writes of her memories of pneumatic tube systems in libraries:

The hiss of the tubes – although not quite as immediate as the whoosh at the bank – is, to me, the library’s keynote, as the composer R. Murray Schafer might call it. It is the audio track over which the building’s other sounds – heavy wooden chairs scraping across terrazzo floors, books thumping on tables, whispers ricocheting off hard surfaces – are laid (author’s emphasis)

I don't have any sound recording of library tubes, but I do have this great picture above, from 

John Caserta's lecture notes on Serendipity in the Digital Library. I also love the image in this wonderful essay of the newspaper readers. I still remember reading newspapers in the Tasmanian Public Library this way, complete with rulers and string. And more recently, looking for medical textbooks through the card files in the basement of my medical library, where old journals are stored in compressed stacks.

Libraries have not turned completely digital. While the pneumatic tube systems for sending books may have largely disappeared (except for a few places such as the Law Library Reading room at the Library of Congress), look out for the old card files, newspaper strings and compressed stacks, and when you find them, be careful - unlike compressed files, these places do have their dangers of getting squashed!

Mattern, S. (2010) Puffs of air: Communicating by vacuum In John Knechtel, Ed., AIR, Alphabet City #15 (Cambridge: MIT Press), p43. Accessed from http://www.wordsinspace.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Mattern_PuffsOfAirFINAL.pdf (thanks to David Holt for recommending this to me)

Card file image my own, from recent fieldwork in medical libraries in Melbourne, Australia.

pneumatic sounds

Some pneumatic tube sounds from my factory tour:

Sending ...



And receiving ...



For some other wonderful pneumatic tube sounds listen also to the Buispost blog.

le bruit de choc

Paris in the 1890s, and a tubiste working in the Poste Pneumatique pulls a lever, cranks a steel door, exchanges cylinders and closes the door again. Sweat forms on his brow as he turns the wheel to create a vacuum and apply compressed air. He pauses to ring the bell so the next station knows of the coming delivery. A tubiste down the line rings his bell when he hears le bruit de choc as the tube arrives at his station.

This section of text, adapted from Molly Wright Steenson's Cabinet article, is filled with sound. The soundscapes of these brass-age pneumatic systems evoke the work involved in sending pneumatic missives underneath the city. These historic sonic delights are however considered pollution in many modern day hospitals, with an increasing call to 'turn the sound down' in clinical work spaces.
  
Swisslog have responded to this drive with their patent-pending Whisper Receiving System, which minimises noise associated with pneumatic transportation. Recently installed in the positively named Le Bonheur Hospital in America, the system is said to enable employees to concentrate better on the patient care requirements of the hospital. I wonder how the tubistes were ever able to get their work done with all of that cranking, clanging and bell ringing!

Image from Scott Kostolni's Flikrstream.