10 of the more bizarre and wonderful uses for pneumatic tubes (you'll never guess number 8!)

1. Corpse network, Austria

When the Zentralfriedhof, or Central Cemetry, was built on the outskirts of Vienna in the 19th Century, funeral directors had a problem - how to transport those who had died to this new site? Horse-drawn carts were an option, but with all of that snow in winter, were unreliable. That's when an engineer and architect came up with the mad plan of pneumatic corpse travel, moving corpses from the centre of town to the cemetery through an underground pneumatic tube.

The plans were never realised, but you can read more about them and the reasons why they weren't actualised here. I first heard about these incredible proposed networks from the work of sociologist Florian Bettel, currently based in Vienna. If you can read German, check out his chapter on the subject in Junge Forschung in Wissenschaft und Kunst, published by Springer in 2010.

Image of Zentralfriedhof from Florian Rieder's Flikr album.

2. Direct line to Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, US

Jeff Highsmith has to be one of the coolest Dads ever. Struck with the dilemma of explaining how teeth get delivered to the Tooth Fairy, when his son lost is first tooth, he came up with a brilliant solution: a pneumatic transport system of course! He went about designing his own system in his house, for sending teeth, and receiving money in return (there are also options for communicating with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny). Hacking and sawing away, this Cool Dad tinkered in his workshop with iphone, tubing and vacuums until he had made the perfect made-to-measure pneumatic system for his kids. Jeff has written about how you too can make such a home network for communications with fairies, bearded jolly fellows and magical bunnies on Makezine, and there is a video there too to watch.

Image from Makezine.

3. Love hotel payments, Japan

The discrete way to pay for your hour/day/evening in a Japanese love hotel. In love hotels, interactions with staff are minimised as much as possible. Customers may choose their room from screens, and may settle their bill either by pneumatic tube, automatic cash machines or with a "pair of hands" behind a frosted pane of glass.

Image from Selena Hoy's Flikr album.

4. Feline transport, US

On October 7, 1897 a ceremonial demonstration took places at the New York City General Post Office, as a way to celebrate their new pneumatic tube system. In the first canister was a bible wrapped in an American flag, along with a copy of the Constitution, a copy of a presidential speech and some other papers.

In the second was a giant peach. 

And in the third, was a cat. 

The cat, although a little dazed, survived its pneumatic voyage.

Read more about this historic Cat Subway at The Hatching Cat and The Atlantic, and about other cat voyages, such as that made by a sick cat to the vet. Image (Ok not technically of a pneumatic tube, but a close steam-punk look alike, and the cat in it was just too irresistable) is from Mouse Breath, the award winning lifestyle magazine by cats.

5. Cold beer "on tap", Germany

See what these BBQers are so excited about here. For another pretty bizarre and wonderful domestic pneumatic technology, have a look at these pneumatic elevators (or these or these).

6. Disposal of mouse ears and other Disney trash, US

Otherwise known as the Avac System, Disneyworld has an underground garbage disposal system as fantastical as the worlds above ground. The system is relatively simple - workers on the ground pick up trash and put it to bins connected to a pneumatic tube system. Every 20 minutes the system fires, and the trash is moved by compressed air to a collection point, where it is loaded onto garbage trucks. One can only imagine the kind of rubbish that the DisneyWorld pneumatic garbage system has to deal with; mouse ears, glow-in-the-dark tubes, fairy floss sticks?

Image from Military Disney Tips.

7. Fast food, New Zealand

Taking food in the antipodes to new heights, C1 Espresso cafe in Christchurch, New Zealand has its very own Pneumatic Menu of burgers, which yes, indeed, are delivered to your table by pneumatic tube systems.

Image from C1 Espresso.

8. Helping salmon swim upstream, US

First we had cats travelling in the tubes. Now fish.

Due to damming and the lack of fish ladders in the Pacific Northwest, migrating salmon have a hard time getting to breeding habitats. Biologists in Washington however, have been experimenting with a pneumatic tube solution, using Whooshh's patented pneumatic tubes as a way in which to move the salmon by pressurised air, rather than water. According to High Country News, the method is "less stressful for fish than moving them by hand, because it minimizes human contact and returns them to water faster". Scientific tests have shown that there are no obvious injuries in live fish transported through this "unique fish conveyence device". This doesn't matter so much for the fish travelling in tubes installed in processing plants in Norway, where they move from gutting to filleting stations.

Copyright image by Walter Baxter from Geograph, is used under the Creative Commons License.

ead more here: http://www.adn.com/2014/06/23/3530318/alaska-newsreader-pneumatic-tubes.html#storylink=cpy

9. Flower deliveries, Canada

Of the many inventive uses for pneumatic tubes, those in Anne Michael's novel The Winter Vault, are perhaps some of the most whimsical, including an ingenious form of flower delivery:

My father's first job, when he was fifteen, said Avery, was at Lamson Pneumatic Tubes. Ever since I can remember, we shared an affection for pneumatic tubes: ingenious, practical, inexplicably humorous. We loved the idea of an elegant, handwritten note, perhaps a love letter, stuffed into a cylinder and then shot through a tube of compressed air at thirty-five miles an hour or sucked up by a vacuum at the other end like liquid through a straw. My father believed this was the most unjustly neglected technology of the century, and we were continually thinking up new uses for pneumatic tube systems ... He drew maps of London criss-crossed with hundreds of miles of underground pneumatics - little trains of capsule-cars for public transportation; groceries delivered direct from shops to private residences, swooshed right into the kitchen icebox; flowers shot directly from the florist into the vase on one's piano; delivery of medicines to hospitals and convalescent homes; pneumatic school buses, pneumatic amusement rides, pneumatically operated brass brands... (p18 – 19)

Image of the Aalsmeer Flower Auction (home of other wonderful technologies such as the reverse clock auction), my own.

10. Fashion accessory purchases, US

While the vast pneumatic post network in New York City may have disappeared, there are still remnants of pneumatic tube wonderfulness to be found in the city. Warby Parker have recently installed a pneumatic tube system from their basement, to send their glasses to customers in upper floors of their book-lined Upper East Side store. Swatch's Midtown store also has pneumatic tubes delivering their accessories to customers as they wait at the "Watch Bar". All much more fun than buying online.

Images from Pentagram and Warby Parker.

the underwater tunnels

When travelling to Australia recently, Chris Gray from West Yorkshire, UK, was feeling homesick, and wanted to just "nip home". Inspired by Harry Beck's London map, he invented a global Underground network, which would enable travellers to move between countries, and traverse great bodies of water by zooming through tunnels.

This is not a new idea. Connecting countries, and indeed the world, by underwater tunnels has fascinated science fiction writers and engineers for centuries. Jules Verne wrote about underwater travel and underwater pneumatic tube systems can be found in the world of Futurama.

 

Less fictional, there is of course the Channel Tunnel, now star of a new TV series, The Tunnel. And more recently opened, is the much awaited and controversial Bosphorus Tunnel, connecting Asia and Europe. Crossing the Atlantic though has proved more difficult. In the Daily Mail report on Gray's fantastical global network, engineer Robert Benaim suggests that one solution to the perplexing puzzle of how to connect America and Europe, may be a floating pneumatic tube, similar to Elon Musk's Hyperloop. This sounds very similar to Futurama's underwater system, and those of Verne's novels. Once again, fiction and real-life blurs, in the wonderful world of pneumatic tubes.

Image 1 my own, under the Bosphorus one month after tunnel opens in Istanbul, December 2013 

Image 2 from Futurama

pneumatic pulled pork

From the reviews, C1 Espresso sounds like the kind of cafe which makes you want to live in Christchurch, New Zealand. Or at least to visit one day very soon. There seem to be so many fantastical details to this cafe it is hard to know where to start: bookshelf sliding doors; water out of a sewing machine; and from this year, burgers out of pneumatic tubes. I've written about this cafe before, but now I see that they have established a very special Pneumatic sliders menu.

How much more delicious could a pulled pork shoulder burger get, than when delivered to your table at 100 km/hr?

3 burgers and fries are $20. C1 Espresso is open 7 days a week, 7am - 10pm, Corner High and Tuam Streets in Christchurch, New Zealand.

pneumatic correspondence of note

The writers Franz Kafka and Max Brod were great friends. When Kafka died, it was Brod who ignored his request to burn Kafka's life's work, and had them published instead. The two communicated often, including by pneumatic post:

An instant message of its time, Franz was to meet Max with his interesting cousin that evening. A Paraguayan in Prague, and no doubt a lively evening ahead.

Note published in the book of Franz Kafka's correspondence entitled: Letters to Friends, Family and Editors (published 1977).

more tubes on display

Pneumatic tubes create not only wonderful museum exhibits, but also gallery installations too. The network of pipes have inspired artists such as: Yvonne lee Schultz, whose installation Thoughts was installed in the European Patent Office in 2004 (there are many fantastic pneumatic tube related patents in archives, in offices and online!); Serge Spitzer's Re/Search: Bread and Butter and the ever present Question of How to define the difference between a Baguette and a Croissant (II), which was shown at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, in 2010; and most recently, PNEUMAtic circUS's Octo, on display at the transmediale festival for art and digital culture, in Berlin in 2013.

Image of Serge Spitzer's installation at Palais de Tokyo.

pneu and old exhibitions

We can learn a lot about pneumatic tube systems from the material exhibited, and in the archives, of museums. Through such artifacts we learn about the materials used in these systems over time, about the ways in which they were mapped, drawn, and adapted by users. These materials also make great objects for display, offering lots of fun potential for inter-museum romances by post, and other correspondences.

Fantastic pneumatic tube content can be found in permanent installations in museums such as the Post and Tele Museum in Copenhagen, La Musee de La Poste in Paris, the Museum fur Kommunikation in Berlin, the Technisches Museum in Vienna and the Luftmuseum in Amberg. And in the Museum of London and York's National Railway Museum you can visit two original capsules from the London Pneumatic Dispatch Company.

There are many other science museums which also have small installations, some interactive, such as at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, where visitors can feed tennis balls into tubes and at the Museum of Science in Boston, where visitors can send magnetic "letters" by pneumatics. You can watch videos of visitors interacting with the system in Berlin here (including tube cam!) and another terrific one here.

Some museum workshops and exhibitions are more temporary. Several years ago I wrote about the Fast Trash exhibition in New York, which explored the fascinating story of Roosevelt Island's pneumatic garbage system.

A little further back, in 2006 the Smithsonian Museum had a Marvelous Ways to Move Mail exhibition, with the Missile Mail and Pneumatic Tubes activity, involving visitors building cardboard missiles (read more from the museum about pneumatic tubes here).

At the Australian Museum of Democracy, students learn about the Franklin River debate in Tasmania, through an interactive workshop which involves them sending a copy of a conservation act to the House of Representatives chamber through the museums' pneumatic tube system. The students love it!

For those interested in these kind of events, this summer in New Mexico, US, The Parachute Company will host hands-on workshops in libraries specifically about pneumatic tubes. Visitors will find a system of tubes, through which they can send their own messages in canisters. They will be encouraged to use a range of printing techniques to craft their messages, including cryptography. The workshop is designed to explore how networks work, through creative engagements with pneumatic technology. The Parachute Company organises these kinds of events for the public to explore and have fun with technology, art and culture. For more details of this and other workshops this summer, see the Hitchhiker website for New Mexico librarians.

Coming up soon: pneumatic tubes in art galleries
Images from Phanomenta Das Science-Centre, from Wikimedia and from pilot_micha's Flikr page.

tubes fit for a king

My favourite pneumatic tube spotter just sent me a preview for Kingsman: The Secret Service. Is that a luxurious pneumatic tube transporter hidden there?

archaeological fragments of a mystery

A follow-up on last week's post about the Dreyfus Affair, for at the train station the other day I spied an intriguing poster for a new book by crime writer Robert Harris:

Harris has written a historical fictionalised account of events surrounding the Dreyfus Affair, from the perspective of Colonel Georges Picquart, whose tireless investigations led to the ultimate release of Alfred Dreyfus from imprisonment.

A petit taster. Paris, 1896. Colonel Georges Picquart has handed his trusty officer Lauth the infamous cone of torn-up documents without looking at them yet:

He dons his apron, and while he fetches his box of equipment from his cupboard, I empty the paper sack over his desk. Immediately my eye is caught by a sprinkling among the white and grey of several dozen pale blue fragments, like patches of sky on a cloudy day. I poke a couple with my forefinger. They are slightly thicker than normal paper. Lauth picks one up with his tweezers and examines it, turning it back and forth in the beam of his powerful electric lamp. 

"A petit bleu," he murmurs, using the slang expression for a pneumatic telegram card. He looks at me and frowns. "The pieces are torn up smaller than usual." 

"See what you can do." 

It must be four or five hours later that Lauth comes to my office. He is carrying a thin manila folder. He winces with distress as he offers it to me. his whole manner is anxious, uneasy. "I think you ought to look at this," he says. 

I open it. Inside lies the petit bleu. he has done a craftsman's job of sticking it back together. The texture reminds me of something that might have been reconstructed by an archaeologist: a fragment of broken glassware, perhaps, or a blue marble tile. it is jagged on the right-hand side, where some of the pieces are missing, and the lines of the tears give it a veined appearance. But the message in French is clear enough.

The message implies another officer's guilt and Dreyfus' innocence. The discovery is a pivotal moment in the plot, one that the characters return back to. Harris reconstructs the story from fragments and shards of documents himself, breathing life into that moment. The Evening Standard declares that Harris is committed to the belief that "you can get at a truth as a novelist in a way you can't as a historian - you can bring things alive, the sense of fear, prickly fear, the sweat, the smell of the place and so on".

For those who like the book, apparently the idea came from a lunch with Roman Polanski. So look out for the film soon!

Dreyfus bleus

For some years now my friend Patrice and I have been reading In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. It is a book club of two, with many wonderful evenings spent together, sometimes talking of the book, walking in the botanical gardens, in wine bars or more recently chatting on Skype. At the moment we are reading The Guermantes Way, the third volume. It is here that the narrator becomes immersed in dinner parties and afternoon teas where much talk is of the Dreyfus Affair.

Alfred Dreyfus was a young Jewish artillery officer in the French Army who, in December 1984, was convicted of treason, accused of spying for the Germans. In the following days he was publicly degraded, his medals stripped, his sword broken, spat on by the crowd. After years exiled in prison in a tiny island in the Atlantic, it was to be a pneumatique telegramme, a petit bleu, which would begin a cascade of events leading to the release of this innocent man.

One day in 1986, a petit-bleu, torn-up and never sent, was found in the contents of a rubbish bin in the Germany military post in Paris. When pieced together (see above) the message was revealed, implicating another French officer in the offences attributed to Dreyfus. It took another 10 years before Dreyfus was restored to commission and his innocence publicly declared in the same place where he had been previously dishonoured.

It seems sadly ironic that a torn-up telegramme led to the release of Dreyfus, considering that it was torn-up documents that led to his conviction (where bizarrely the lack of correspondence between Dreyfus' writing and that of the document was proof of "self-forgery"). This was a very important moment in French history, a topic of much Paris salon repartee, and by the end of the 19th century a pre-occupation of many in the country, with camps divided. Indeed some argue that we are still in the midst of Dreyfus Affairs, where national panic takes false prisoners.

Information for this blogpost largely sourced from Trial of the Century: Revisiting the Dreyfus Affair by Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker (September 28, 2009).

Image from Europeana

no longer the dead centre of town: pneumatic burials

Whenever we would drive past a cemetery on family roadtrips, my dad would often point out the window and say "there is the dead centre of town".

What happens though when cities get so big that they have to start burying their dead outside them, for reasons of space and hygiene? This was a problem that faced Vienna in the late 19th Century, and so a new cemetery, the Zentralfriedhof, or Central Cemetery, was built on the city's outskirts. There was a problem though with this new arrangement - being almost 9km out of town, how to transport those who had died to this new burial site?

Initially transport relied on horse-drawn cart. In poor weather, especially snow, this led to all kinds of chaos however, with coffins sometimes left in taverns along the way. Another solution had to be found. And so the engineer  Franz von Felbinger and architect Josef Hudetz came up with the ingenious plan of pneumatic corpse transportation.

Published as Begräbnishalle mit pneumatischer Förderung für den Centralfriedhof der Stadt Wien, the proposal was as follows, as reported in Scientific American on October 3rd 1874 (and summarised in the Otago Witness February 13th 1875):

It is proposed to erect a grand monumental hall or temple, which is to be divided into three portions, a middle hall and two smaller ones, the former to be devoted to the use of Roman Catholics, and the latter respectively to Protestants and Israelites. These apartments will be subdivided into chapels suitably furnished and decorated.

On a funeral taking place, the body in its coffin will be deposited in a sarcophagus in the centre of one of the chapels, and the ceremony proceeded with. At the conclusion, the chief mourner touches a spring, when the sarcophagus sinks noiselessly through the floor. This corresponds to the public burial, as far as the mourners are concerned, they have nothing further to do with the body. On its arrival, however, in the cellar, men stationed for the purpose attach a check to the bier, showing to which cemetery it is to be forwarded, and place the body, with three others, in an iron car which fits in a subterranean tube, running on trucks placed therein, after the plan described by us as followed in the construction of the experimental section of the pneumatic railway under Broadway in this City. This tunnel in Vienna will be 15,000 feet long, and the carriages will be propelled through its entire length, by means of a blast of compressed air, in about ten minutes.

The incredible pneumatic burial plan was never realised, reportedly due to technical problems and "issues of peity". Corpses were eventually transported to the cemetery by tramline in the early 20th century, then motorised hearse.

This is an intriguing chapter in the story of people moving by pneumatic tube, which raises many interesting questions: What were the issues of peity, that worked against the proposal? How much did the Viennese public know of these plans, and what did they think of them? It is fascinating that the religions were separated above ground, yet bodies were propelled through the tunnel together - or were they to be differentiated here too, with separate religious tracks or trolleys  in the system? The notion of the noiseless sinking into the subterranean tube correlating with a public burial is also intriguing.

From what I can find, there seems little written about the plans in English (although see references below). I do know that the researcher Florian Bettel, from the Universität Mozarteum Salzburg has written on the topic in German, for those who are interested, and for those interested in pneumatic systems in Vienna more generally, you may find the publication below, in English and German, a good read (if you can find a copy to buy online).

Information for this post obtained from Vienna: A Cultural History by Nicholas Parsons and Vienna: A Doctor's Guide by Wolfgang Regal and Michael Nanut. For more information about the pneumatic postal system in Vienna see The Pneumatic Post in Vienna by Colin Tobitt and Andy Taylor, published in English in 2005. Image of patent for "Method of preserving dead bodies" from Atlas Obscura.