tubes are 10 years old

This year marks the 10th year anniversary of YouTube. What would we do without the wonders of this broadcasting service these days? How else would we learn to cast on, pull teeth, fold t-shirts, test genetics or build our own pneumatic tube systems? The Guardian reports on other ways in which our lives have changed since we started putting ourselves on the tube ...

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.

i love you tubes

It's back to work this week, so if you are like me you might be in the mood for a little light entertainment while at the computer (and you can learn about how capsules move in a pneumatic tube system at the same time!):

Video of David Cross loving the tubes, from Just Shoot Me!, from YouTube.

tube cam

While it has been a few months since I have blogged about pneumatics, they certainly haven't strayed too far from my thoughts - how could they! I've enjoyed novels and short stories about them, heard about fantastic pneumatic art projects, spent a day in a pneumatic tube factory and kept up-to-date with all of the latest hospital installations. Which means many interesting pneumatic posts to come, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, a video to share, posted by Exploratorium, called Science in the City: Pneumatic Tubes. It is a little documentary about the famous Stanford Hospital system which has inspired many creative adventures by pneumatic tube lovers. This one is special for its camera footage, dubbed by a commenter as "tube cam". The visuals and sounds are wonderful in this footage, which feels like a mix between a waterslide ride and an endoscopic exploration.

Still video image of inside a hospital pneumatic tube from YouTube, Science in the City: Pneumatic Tubes.

DIY pneumatic tube system

First there was steampunk, then there was biopunk, and now there is vacuumpunk:

For the less successful skittle experiment, click here.

the tubes of tomorrow: the future marches on!

How do we imagine and talk about the future? This question and others are raised in a great book I am reading at the moment called Contested Futures, an edited collection of essays about technoscience.

One essay, by Dutch researcher Harro van Lente, examines the different kinds of language involved in voicing the technological future. He writes that often historical instances are used to formulate technical progress as one piece of ongoing evolution, that is inevitable, and must not be stopped.

This essay is very relevant to the work I am doing on genetic research which steams ahead at a remarkable, seemingly unstoppable pace. But I am also interested in how pneumatic tubes are used as a linguistic device to represent the future of technological progress.

This wonderful prune commercial filled with pneumatic-people tubes, wrinke technicians and rockets seems to be a great example of van Lente's argument, that images of history are pulled together to create a narrative of technological achievement.

Thanks to James Veitch @seamusamadan for his link to this video on twitter.

pneumatic tube classic of the week 1

This great bit of footage from Brazil, where a little bit of re-hosing has a magical effect, is the first post in my 'classics' category. The 'pneumatic tube classic of the week', following from the 'pneumatic tube map of the week', will be a post about a classic book, film, cartoon, TV show or other media about pneumatic tube systems.

Please send in any of your favourite pneumatic tube classics to be potentially included on the list!

Video from YouTube.

pneumatic tube cartoons

There is a great collection of videos on YouTube put out by pneumatic tube company Telepost (see this previous post for a YouTube video by Swisslog). The cartoons are cute, the music catchy and they do a great job of illustrating the work of pneumatic tubes (their human-like attributes being key to actor network ideas about the social life of non-human entities).

This video is about hospitals but there are more set in supermarkets and other places where the company installs pneumatic tube systems.