the last of the drive-thru banking tubes?

The Drive-Thru has always fascinated me. How the act of getting out of your car becomes too much work. Having grown up in Australia, I mostly know drive-thrus from fast-food outlets (how can I forget the head-sets, beeping fryers and frantic burger orders of my high-school KFC job!). In the US however, drive-thrus are used for all manner of services: mail, coffee, pharmacies, and banks.

Until recently, many drive-thru banks used pneumatic tubes. When I read comments to online articles on pneumatic tubes, there are invariably a string of anecdotes and memories of bank drive-thru pneumatic tubes. According to a New Jersey website, we might be seeing the last of these banking tubes however. Their numbers are dwindling. The down-sizing is taking place in the context of down-sizing of banks more generally, as banking cultures change.

Not everyone likes to do their banking online or at an ATM however. For some, there is a reassurance in the personal transaction. And for others, there is just the fun of sending money into a vacuum.

pneumatic news

Latest WIRED news from friend Brian (who could have done something similar himself (and may still do ;)): Elon Musk's hyperloop will start construction next year - stay tuned!

Image from Twitter.

forgotten tubes

My brother in law has always been wonderful at finding pneumatic tube references in literature. He found another in the book he was reading recently, called Amnesia, by Australian writer Peter Carey:

"So it was, strolling across the Swanston Street bridge for the first time in forty years, I found myself swimming in the giddiness of time, knowing exactly where I was and having no idea at all. I chose to go to Henry Bucks by way of Flinders Street, in order that I might pass the embalmbed corpse of The Herald building (where I had once been so firmly edited). The bitter wind drove lolly papers past its shuttered doors. I sometimes dream of the Herald as it was so long ago: the marble and terrazzo, oak panels, the whistling thumping vacuum tubes above your head. There are always bizarre copy boys and copy girls with carbon-paper smudges on their cheeks. People come and go in pursuit of unimaginable business. Some walk directly to the banks of clunking lifts. Men in hats rush past the front desk and through a swinging door"  (p53)

As I currently stroll Melbourne's Swantston Street and Flinders Street I also find myself "swimming in the giddiness of time", drowning or floating in the unfamiliar known, the uknown familiars of a city I have lived on and off in over the last 10 or so years. On the train into the city, I look out at the old Herald building and imagine all those newspaper copies whirling through tubes many years ago.

Paddington line

Steam punkers and pneumatic tube afficionados are in for a treat with the most recent Paddington movie, which has a terrific pneumatic sequence at the Geographer's Guild in London, complete with computer-controlled dispatch, tube cam and lots of brass. Watch the footage here.

Thanks to Richard Tutton, and Tom and Emma for the heads-up on this!

Lapsed London history

I can highly recommend a new article on pneumatic tubes which has appeared recently on the slickly designed Lapsed Historian website. Written by a transportoholic and history lover known as Long Branch Mike, the article entitled Get Them on the Blower traces the history of postal pneumatic tubes in London. Rich in historical detail and imagery, the article is also filled with a physical sense of the materiality of the tubes in the 19th century, with stories of experiments in making them of leather, felt, vulcanised fibre, celluloid, alluminium, brass and finally plastic with felt or leather lining. There is a lot of new material for those already familiar with pneumatic tube systems and some novel links to other fascinating kinds of tubes such as speaking tubes (see below) and voice pipes.

Reader's interested in London's pneumatic tube transport systems may be interested in Ian Steadman's article in The New Statesman.

Speaking tubes image from Wikipedia. See also the following website for a comprehensive account of speaking tubes and voicepipes: http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/COMMS/voicepipe/voicepipe.htm

belated christmas post

Sometimes Christmas cards come a little late in the mail. Maybe the cards were left on the coffee table in the rush to fill stockings. Or maybe they got held up as postal systems struggled against the tides of envelopes filled with glitter and Amazon packages being urgently delivered.



This is a piece of Christmas mail that was never sent, waiting in my drafts folder for Christmas week but lost in the rush. But, like all mail, better late than never! So a little bit of Christmas for your January, a gorgeous steampunk way for Santa to get around the globe (courtesy of Core.2 in their comments on a pneumatic tube Gizmodo article).

Washington Post

Choosing which museums to visit in Washington D.C. is a monumental task, but I had no hesitation about heading straight to the Smithsonian Postal Museum during my time off, on a recent work visit to the capital city. Certainly one of the museum jewels of the city, the museum is housed in the majestic old City Post Office building and hosts never-ending postal amusements to be entertained by, from collecting stamps to writing postcards.

After making my way past the gilt postal desks in the entrance way and then security, I walked underneath the sparkling ceiling of stamps straight into the little Pneumatic Tube Service exhibit. You can find a picture on the right, a little dark unfortunately because of the low lighting. The capsule exhibited is one of the highlights of the collection (follow the links to find some great video footage).  There is a little text on the systems built and used in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Boston and St Louis, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

While this part of the permanent collection is small, I did find some other pneumatic traces elsewhere, such as a telegramme, and a plethora of links online (start with the special section on Pneumatic Tube Mail).

I loved this postal museum, where you can make your own stamp collection from donated stamps and cancel postcards in different historical periods. There is a movie which shows how post moves through the U.S. postal system, which reveals some of the wonders of how letters arrive at their destinations - I experienced the same kind of fascination watching this film as I did as a child watching how crayons were made on Sesame Street. And at the end of the visit you can send your favourite postcards with carefully chosen stamps at the museums' own postoffice. Researchers who want to know more can arrange to visit the museum library on specific days of the month or by appointment - next time!

Image my own.

strike

Last month I not only did a lot of travelling on planes but also trains. Sometimes the trains ran smoothly, according to schedules. Other times they stopped altogether, because of strikes, train journeys flashing on boards but never to run. During strikes travellers are reminded of the invisible human work that goes into getting them from A to B, C and D.

There is also of course much invisible human labour that either gets displaced by, or is involved in, the operating of pneumatic tubes. And in times of revolt (just as in times of breakdown), this invisible work also becomes more visible.

Several weeks ago, hospital workers in Malta took action against their working conditions during a strike. The Union Haddiema Maghqudin issued directives to laboratory technicians of the Mater Dei hospital in Malta to refuse to process essential and urgent blood tests. They were to do this by not accepting blood samples through the pneumatic tube system.

This meant that no blood results were issued and nurses and midwives were forced, according to Malta Today, to "abandon their wards" and take the samples physically to the laboratory, where they could "beg" technicians to perform the tests. The hospitals encouraged their staff to counteract the strike by continuing to send samples through the tubes, and if returned, to keep sending them in hope that the technicians accept the blood samples eventually.

It was a battle conducted through the tubes, with blood literally, flying back and forth. The hospital and newspapers both declared this a matter of life and death. The issue not only highlighted how integral the infrastructure is to patient care, but also the kinds of work both entailed in keeping it running, as well as the kind of work it replaced, nurses work on wards for example. In this case an infrastructure of connection become central to, and highlighted the disconnections between hospitals, governments and staff in which it was embedded.

Image my own.

documents and other objects, flying around

I've been doing a bit of flying in and out of Amsterdam's Schiphol airport recently. During one trip I visited a branch of my bank, to ensure my debit card wouldn't be blocked in the U.S. I had heard that there were pneumatic tubes connecting several branches of a bank in the airport. But there were no signs of the system to be found. Until I opened up my email back in Maastricht that is ...

There was a message from Patryk Wasiak, a cultural historian I met in Copenhagen recently, at the History of Infrastructure conference. And with his note was a scanned picture from a 1981 edition of the "Przeglad Techniczny" (Technical Review). Patryk tells me that the image (below, and enlarged above) accompanied an article about the recently opened airport terminal, celebrating its technological marvels. The caption for the photo says the airport pneumatic tube system was used to transfer travel documents between old and new terminals.

There are so many hidden networks and infrastructures in airports to which travellers are oblivious. We mostly think about how our luggage arrives, or how to get to our gate. We are the moving bodies, maybe our luggage too. But there is a whole manner of different kinds of travelling occurring in these places. Documents from one building to the next in the 1980s. Money between bank branches. Animals in and out of quarantine, nearby nature reserves, crates and cages (see more in Susanne Bauer and colleagues' work on animal ecologies in airports). For non-places, there is a lot moving around behind the departure lounge drudgery and duty-free gloss!

contamination risk?

Can the use of pneumatic tubes to transport lab samples of a deadly virus lead to wider contamination? This is the fear of some hospital staff where an Ebola patient has been treated recently in Maryland, U.S.

The hospital, in an attempt to calm such fears, issued a statement declaring that while the lab samples of the patient did travel by pneumatic tube during his first visit to the hospital, at no time did they leak or spill from their bag or carrier into the tube system. During the patient's second visit, the pneumatic tube system was not used. Specimens were instead "triple bagged", placed in a container, placed in another container and then hand-carried to the lab via a "buddy system". Contrast this with health facilities in Guinea, where nurses don't even have an adequate supply of gloves, as reported in this blogpost, part of Somatosphere's intelligent coverage of the disastrous epidemic, Ebola Fieldnotes.

Image of biohazard bags for pneumatic tube system, my own.