running outdoors

Long Branch Mike has alerted me to another amazing pneumatic tube system - the one running underneath Indiana University Health's People Mover, which connects several hospitals in Indianapolis.

These outdoor hospital tubes are pretty impressive - they remind me of riding the monorail to Disneyland as a kid. The gaps in the rails are designed to prevent the collection of snow. Although as Mike wonders, how do they keep the tubes from freezing in the winter? Must investigate.

Image by Dina Wakulchik from Indianapolis, Indiana, USA - Clarian Health Partners People Mover, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5193131.

how iphones helped solve a medical mystery

While hospital pneumatic tubes work well a lot of the time, sometimes there are mishaps - contents of containers might spill for example, or objects get stuck, or blood samples clot. There are all kinds of ways of finding out the problem spots in pneumatic tubes - I am currently writing a book chapter on how sound is used for example. But today I wanted to write about another method used recently at the University of Virginia - the iphone repair method.

Two pathology professors at the university theorised that it may be due to points of high pressure that there were problems and sent two iphones through their hospital tubes to check. One phone had a sensor app and a light source and the other recorded the journey of a blood sample. The footage surprised them - the blood's journey was like a blender, "like you are mixing a margarita". The hospital no longer sends their blood on long journeys to avoid the cocktail-effect.

You can read more and listen to the story here, on WVTF public radio.

shoe tubes

I bought my first pair of Nikes when they started knitting them. But I would have bought a pair earlier if I had known they would have been delivered by "shoe tubes"!

Read more here in the Baltimore Sun.

Thanks once again for another wonderful pneumatic tube tip Patryk! Image of shoe tubes in Niketown from Honolulu Star article.

part victorian, part jetsons

"The dream of the pneumatic tube will never die" ....

And so begins a carefully and beautifully collaged video of pneumatic tubes by Vox - watch til the end to see what they did with the goldfish!

London pneumatic tube talk in August

Mike Oliver, AKA Long Branch Mike, will present the London Pneumatic Despatch Railway at the London Underground Railway Society (LURS) on Tuesday August 6. His talk will include an overview on pneumatic tubes development.

"London's Lost Pneumatic Railway: The World's Second Oldest Underground Service" with Mike Olivier.

Doors open at 18:40 for a prompt 19:15 start

The Upper Room
Allsouls Clubhouse
141 Cleveland Street
London W1T 6QG

Great Portland Street Tube on the Metropolitan, Circle, and Hammersmith & City

straight to perfumery

I saw a trailer for the movie Brooklyn the other day and thought I glimpsed a gorgeous set of brass pneumatic tubes in the department store where the main character is working. I am off to the movies with friends on Wednesday to check! And let me know if you have seen any too. In the meantime, here are some tubes in the perfumery department of the old Myer in Melbourne to enjoy.

Image from WeekendNotes, as seen at Myer Mural Hall open day.

nothing funnier than an arm stuck in a tube?

Who doesn't love a bit of slap stick comedy, especially when a pneumatic tube is involved? While some unlucky Tesco manager managed to get their arm stuck in a tube unwittingly, the witty characters of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Hitchcock and Scully pulled the stunt for laughs on the show's episode "Ava". The sounds of screams echoed through the hospital's tubing ...

Read more on Fourthmic News for Comedy Nerds.

Thanks @steveDsmart for the link!

secret parliament tunnels

Canberra, the capital city of my home country Australia, has a reputation for orderly design. This is not only in the carefully orchestrated public spaces and streets above ground, but below ground too. Recently, the curious ABC Canberra reporters Sonya Gee and Matthew Arnaudon went searching for Canberra's secret underground spaces and found traces of the old parliamentary pneumatic tubes.

The tubes connected Parliament House and Defence, as a safe and secure way to transport important documents. The curious reporters travel into the underground tunnels where the tubes lie and receive a demonstration of how the tubes worked. You can read more about the canberra tubes and their museum displays in my previous posts, here and here.

Many thanks to the Canberra-based comic illustrator Stuart McMillen for sending me details of this ABC report!

above above ground

Plans are afoot for even more pneumatic tubes in New York City, already home to the Roosevelt Island tubes and the Hudson Yards developments, as well as many others in the world of fiction and cinema. This time it is the High Line which might be tubed for waste disposal, quoted in The Atlantic's CityLab as perfect for such infrastructure considering that "the tube could be strung along the bottom of the viaduct, avoiding any need to tunnel through streets".

Image of the High Line used under Creative Commons lisence from David Berkowitz's Flikr page.

cash slips and mugs of tea

Wonderful video below by Mike Taylor of the Lamson Pneumatic Tube System at Jacksons of Reading, documenting the cash exchange system of the department store which amazingly operated until 2013 when the store closed. Great sounds, scenes of cash being exchanged amongst mugs of tea and stacks of paper. At the end of the film you learn about Robin Adcroft and Thomas Macey's plans to re-enact this system which they had worked with for years at the store and later bought at auction.



Thanks very much to Mike Olivier for sending me this video!