pneumatic tubes in literature: an updated list

Some further additions to the literature list, from my own reading and some help from the Wikipedians:

Paul Auster: Invisible

Jordan Belfort: The Wolf of Wall Street
Edward Bellamy: Looking Backward
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
Jessica Grant: Love in the Pneumatic Tube Era (in Darwin's Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow, edited by Zsuzsi Gartner)
Robert Harris: An Officer and a Spy
Shena Mackay: The Atmospheric Railway: New and Selected Stories
Ian McEwan: The Innocent
Anne Michaels: The Winter Vault
George Orwell: 1984
Marcel Proust: The Way by Swann
Neal Shusterman: The Downsiders
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five

Further additions courtesy of Wikipedia:

Umberto Eco: The Prague Cemetry
Theodore Fontane: Frau Jenny Treibel (1892)
Moreton Freedgood (pen name John Godey) (1973): The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
Robert Heinlein (1949): Gulf
William Marshall: Faces in the Crowd
Albert Robida (1882): The Twentieth Century
Jean-Paul Satre (1945): The Age of Reason
Jules Verne: Paris in the 20th Century
Michel Verne (1888): An Express of the Future
Michel and Jules Verne (1889): The Day of an American Journalist in 2889



Please add to the list in your comments!

(to come - pneumatic tubes in film and TV)

pneumatics at 10 Downing St

In reading through the fascinating Talk page of the pneumatic tube Wikipedia entry the other week I came across this intriguing addition from a Wikipedian, from Peter Stothard's Thirty Days: An Inside Account of Tony Blair at War. It was a description of the underground Foreign Office (compared by him to the White House Situation Room):

Six small offices are connected by low corridors, stained white walls and scuffed blue floors that need the attentions of Ecovert and Hetty. The mood is more military than diplomatic. A young team of shift-workers, operating both encrypted computers and antique compressed-air communication tubes, gathers intelligence, turns it into memoranda and tries to make sure that the right people read it.

The Wikipedian proposes that the tubes were used in the 10 Downing Street Complex as late as the first half of 2003. In The Official History of Britain and the European Community, Stephen Wall also writes of a pneumatic tube system which ran between 10 Downing St and the Foreign Office. These stories add to the intrigue of pneumatic tube implicated in the transportation not only of lovers' secrets, but politicians' as well.

Image from onaquietday.org.

wikipedians working on the tubes

One of the most popular websites for pneumatic tubes must surely be Wikipedia - it certainly comes up as number one on my Google searches. While information on Wikipedia was once scorned as inaccurate, nowadays it is increasingly becoming the "go to" site for most people who want to find information on anything. Indeed research has shown that Wikipedia is not significantly any more inaccurate than the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Because of the work of many editors and bots, the information can be considered thoroughly reviewed, with errors supposedly picked up very quickly. So, who are these people "behind the scenes" of this ubiquitous internet site?

Early wikipedia adopters were mainly an elite group, however since 2006 the number of novice users increased steadily, gradually forming a Wikipedia community. Sociologists such as René König and Christian Pentzold have studied the practices of Wikipedians very closely, if you are interested in learning more about them. Their work led me to wonder who might be the pneumatic tube Wikipedians?

I have found one so far (and would love to know of any others out there!): Lyle Zapato, who writes about his additions to the pneumatic tube Wikipedia site, on a co-authored blog ZPi (see also his Inteli-Tube Pneumatic Tube proposal). On ZPi Lyle Zapato talks about clarifying ambiguous statements and adding pictures. He also moved a misplaced paragraph and created a separate section on pneumatic tubes in fiction. 

For those interested in the backstage of Wikipedia you can see the Pneumatic Tube page in process by comparing L.Z's original fiction paragraph to the one now on Wikipedia, which has been expanded by other pneumatic enthusiasts to include works by Umberto Eco and Douglas Adams, as well as references to Ghostbusters and videogames. For an even sneakier peak behind the scenes check out the "Talk page" (that other little clicked tab on any Wikipedia article) to see discussions about terminology, better references, and keeping the fiction section to wikistyle.

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.