touring underground

Summer is approaching in Europe and as the skies become bluer and the sun slightly warmer, some of us are dreaming of holidays trips in places a little cooler and darker: the underground.

For centuries tourists in Europe have been fascinated by the underground. In Notes on the Underground, Rosalind Williams writes of popular destinations for 19th century travellers such as caves in Belgium and sewers in Paris. Along with the Magic Underground Tunnels, these subterranean honeypots are also on my travel wishlist, especially the Les Grottes de Remouchamps in The Belgian Ardennes, the Musée des égouts (The Museum of the Sewers) in Paris (thank you Melissa!), and the watery labyrinths of the Dutch city Den Bosch.

For pneumatic tube enthusiasts there are a number of underground tours, such as the Berliner Unterwelten, which has previously run special tours of the pneumatic tube system such as for students of the MA Historical Urban Studies program at the Centre for Metropolitan Studies in Berlin, and annually Atlas Obscura often runs a tour of the Stanford Hospital pneumatic tube system.

Images from Berlin underground tours from Toni Escuder's, escpeapalumni and Maha's Flikr pages.

the magic underground kingdom

Earlier this week, I posted about a conference in Tallinn, with a photo of the magnificent Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. It seemed perfect to follow up that post with a picture of another building, with at least some visual similarities: Cindarella's Castle. Why? Because I have recently discovered something you may already have known about, a secret world underneath a magic one: Magic Kingdom's underground tunnels, including, of course, a pneumatic tube system.

I remember going to Disneyland when I was young, finding out it was a small world after all, riding the monorail, seeing my first 3D film, and waving glow-in-the-dark sticks with my sister during the night parade. It was an amazing holiday and my whole family had a ball. Little did we know though that the fantastical themepark had a major flaw which bugged Walt for years: cast members had to walk through one themed area, to get to another themed area, in costume, to get to and from work, looking all out of place! Disney wanted to fix this with the Florida themepark so he designed the Tunnel system:

According to blogger Steve, a long fan of Disney World who worked there for three years, the tunnel was a hive of activity, with cast members walking along, electric carts, maintenance workers on bicycles and much more. Overhead was all the electrical wiring and plumbing. And the pneumatic tube system, otherwise known as the Avac system.

The Avac system is a garbage system. Trash is picked up from Disneyworld by workers on the ground and dropped into bins which are connected to tubes. Every 20 minutes the Avac system "fires" and the trash is pushed through the large tubes with compressed air, through the whole tunnel to another collection area where garbage trucks pick it up. Apparently if you are standing in the tunnel "it sounds as if a tornado is quickly approaching, then passes you by".

Magical trash disposal! From Tomorrowland to the tip. For those as fascinated by this system and those underground tunnels as me, you are in luck. There is a walking tour which spends some time in the tunnel, something to book for your next trip to Magic Kingdom (but not for those under 16 - apparently according to Hidden Mickeys, "because it would bother children, seeing two Goofys passing each other, Mickey without a head, seeing Minnie eating with Snow White, and ruin the magic". In the meantime, for those who can't make it on the tour and aren't too afraid by what they may see, here is a link to a video of the underground.

Creative Commons image of Cindarella's Castle from Matt Wade photography, via Wikipedia. Other images from MilitaryDisneyTips.com, where much material for this blogpost was also sourced, as well as from HiddenMickeys.

cybernetic dreams and future archeologies

In July this year I will be joining other anthropologists in Tallinn, Estonia, to imagine infrastructures of the past, present and future. I am very excited that my paper on pneumatic tubes was accepted for the panel Infrastructure and imagination: Anthropocene landscapes, urban deep-ecology, cybernetic dreams and future-archeologies, at the 13th European Association of Social Anthropologists Biennial Conference.

Juan Rojas Meyer and Roger Sansi, both in London, are organising the panel which will explore infrastructures as generative sites of ethnographic inquiry, and their potential to motivate the imagination. Topics of papers in the panel sound fascinating and include water supply in Africa and Nepal, waste treatment in Athens, the TransAdriatic Pipeline and clouds. Here is my abstract:

Pneumatic tubes: George Jetson used them to get to work, Antoine Doinel to send a love letter, and the Ministry of Truth to deliver history needing rewriting. These hidden labyrinths of pipes which transport matter by vacuum not only exist in the dreams of cartoonists, filmmakers and science fiction writers, but also engineers of the technological past, present and future. Once traversing the undergrounds of cities for postal delivery or depositing orders on the stock exchange, pneumatic tube networks are nowadays ever increasingly built into the walls, ceilings and basements of hospitals, banks and supermarkets. For despite digitisation, objects still need to be moved from one place to another. Counter intuitively, unlike many technologies of the past, pneumatic tube infrastructures have both changed very little over time and are being used in more contexts than ever before. With this paper I take session participants on a short subterranean tour of the intertwined past, present and future of pneumatic tubes. I examine the materials of this sociotechnical system; plastic capsules, brass buttons and air through which things pass. I look at bodily practices entailed in the manufacture, architectural design, everyday use and repair of the technology, including the adjustments which go to making it work. In Stoic philosophy, pneuma is "breath of life", the active and creative presence in matter. A study of pneuma-tic systems leads to bigger questions of how to consider the "pneumatic qualities" of infrastructures, the creativity that breathes life into the material world we live in.

Image of Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Tallinn, Estonia from Wikipedia Commons.
See also: How to send Estonian vodka through the pneumatic internet, in Wired Magazine.

tubes still run in the snow

The weather is something which social scientists often forget to talk about when they write about technologies. The atmosphere, the elements, wind, rain, sun are left out of accounts. Yet, as the case of pneumatic tube systems highlights, weather is important. Damp, salt, snow, rain all affect the materials of which pneumatic tubes are made, the leather and brass, for example. The Atmospheric Railway in Devon was particularly affected by the difficult weather conditions of the region, partially leading to its demise.

"Bad" weather however has also been a justification for the use of pneumatic tube systems. In the Report of the Postmaster-General to Congress about the use of pneumatic tube systems for the transmission of mail, in 1900, it was argued that the system was safe and difficult to interrupt. Indeed a postmaster in Boston testified that during violent snowstorms, when street traffic was suspended, mail was still delivered by pneumatic tube. Similarly another story was reported, where pneumatic tubes saved the delivery of copies of the New York Herald, intended for readers west and south. The newspapers could not have arrived at the Railroad depot in time by wagon, but a series of tube journeys meant that the newspapers could be sent out without too much delay.

And so these predictions about the usefulness of pneumatic tube systems in New York City during inclement weather proved correct. After a snowstorm 10 years or so later, in 1914, the Pneumatic Tube Postal Commission reported that "New York streets were almost impassable -- New York business houses nevertheless received their important mail on time! The pneumatic tubes carried the mails".

Image from February 1969 nor'easter Wikipedia page, and some historical details from Archive.org and Icewhistle.

pneumatic tubes on film: a list

Undergrounds, streets, shares, shadows, kisses, love letters, ghosts, slime, memories, memos, control, spies and many many secrets - this is pneumatic tubes on film and the beginnings of a list:

1984
À bout de souffle
Argo
Baisers Voles (Stolen Kisses)
Brazil
Le Courniaud (The Sucker)
Ghostbusters II
Olsenbande-Filme (Part 12)
The Living Daylights
The Shadow
Une Femme est une Femme
Wolf of Wall Street

What is missing?

hospitals at night

Hospitals are one of those buildings that, like the patients inhabiting it, never really falls asleep. Around the clock there are blood samples taken, observations recorded, new patients admitted, emergency operations performed. Pneumatic tubes remain in constant use throughout the night, part of this nocturnal activity, moving matter around the place, part of the activity.

While life goes on in the hospital, something changes at night. I remember as a patient being terrified of the night-time, feeling so particularly lonely when the lights went out (but never all the way out). Sounds* play a part of this changed atmosphere. I have just finished reading Tom Rice's rich ethnographic account of sounds and listening in hospitals called Hearing and the Hospital, where he documents the nocturnal soundscape of this institution.

Rice describes how on the cardiothoracic wards at St Thomas' hospital, where he conducted his fieldwork, the lights were dimmed at around 9:30pm and there was a corresponding effort to lower sound levels. Nurses spoke in gentler tones to one another and to patients than they had during the day. Curtains were pulled in such a way that the hooks did not scrape too loudly along the rails. He also describes being a patient at night himself, hearing the distressing cries of an agitated patient nearby. The patient was given a sedative to help maintain calm, a form of what Rice describes as "auditory surveillance".

Pneumatic tube systems are also part of this night-time noise, as capsules rattle around into baskets on wards. Adjustments are constantly being made, in regards to new inventions and tinkering in the hospital, to make these systems quieter.

Night-time in hospitals not only sounds differently, but looks differently too. This week a photoessay that I worked on with Thomas Fuller about The Night-side of Hospitals was published in a wonderful journal called Places, in the Design Observer Group. The essay follows the traces of migrant doctors who are delegated to the margins of Australia's healthcare system, witnessing their movements photographically through a hospital at night. It was an absolute pleasure to work with the editors of the journal, Nancy Levinson and Josh Wallaert on this piece, and to see it published in their journal, which focuses on contemporary architecture, landscape and urbanism. The essay fits within their current interest on public-private spaces.

*On the topic of sounds I can't help but here also mention my collaborator on the photoessay Thomas Fuller's terrific recent series of blogposts on love your bicycle, about bicycle sounds, here, here, here and here.

Image by Thomas Fuller

stomach-churning trip through the shadows

Another addition to the pneumatic tube movie list, and perhaps the most stomach churning yet: The Shadow. In this 1994 film about a vigilante (Alec Baldwin) terrorising the underworld of New York City, it is only fitting that he uses an underground network in his quest.

In the film the pneumatic tube system is used by The Shadow's agents to deliver messages to a central source (pictured above). There is an amazing scene in the film, which you can watch on YouTube, which follows a message from its delivery in a mail slot in an unsuspecting looking door in an unsuspecting building, through its dizzying, leaf-rustling, almost invisible journey through the city.

Images stills from YouTube video mentioned above.

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.

political pipelines

Continuing with our current pneumatic tube movie theme, time for another spy agency, MI6, and the dashing James Bond. Its The Living Daylights, and Agent 007 has been assigned to help a defective KGB officer escape from a concert hall in Bratislava, in the then Czechoslovakia. What better way to do this than through a pipe.

Bond uses the Trans-Siberian Pipeline to smuggle his man, thanks to the help of a contact who works for the pipeline. To do so, 007 uses a cleaning capsule (otherwise known as a pipeline inspection gauge) specially designed by the Q Branch. The KGB officer is a bit hesitant about becoming a human specimen in the pipeline. He asks Bond how many times they've done this before - "Relax" Bond says, "you're the first".

OK, this isn't technically a pneumatic tube, but it looks so much like one! And it was too tempting to post this not only because of the current "gas war", but also because, well, it is James Bond and its not everyday that someone wears a tux when sending a capsule off through an international pipeline.

Images and information for this blogpost resourced from The Air Pump and James Bond Gadgets file in MyHavens.

ghosts of pneumatic tubes past

It seems just that sort of week to continue on with the theme of movie posts, with Oscar antics not far behind us. For the last two weeks I have written about movies where pneumatic tube networks play cameo appearances hidden in the walls in office scenes. Time now to head underground, to one of the classic films of the late 1980s: Ghostbusters II.

In the sequel the busters are saving NYC (i.e. the world) yet again from those nasty ghosts. Their investigations lead them to bury beneath First Avenue. Suspended from a cable, Raymond is lowered underground through an air shaft. Soon he enters a tiled chamber, glowing pink. His flashlight zig-zagging around, he discovers that it is none other than a chamber of the abandoned pneumatic transit line. But that isn't the only surprise. Down below, bubbles the river of psychomagnotheric slime.

It is interesting to think about the different uses of these underground infrastructures over time, as often tunneling underground for one technology may be used for another in the future. In this case from pneumatic tubes to slime! Later on in the movie the Ghostbusters head further into the tunnels, following an old transit map. Read more about their adventures on the Ghostbusters Wiki, or click here for a Youtube of the section of GB2 where Raymond is lowered into the tiled pneumatic tube chamber.

Images from Ghostbusters.Wikia.