slow speed

Pneumatic tubes and pneumatic-tube inspired trains such as the Hyperloop are often all about speed and efficiency. Since the invention of trains, designers have wanted them to go faster and faster. There is a photoessay on these fast trains for those interested here.

But fast is not always best. Germany's new ICE trains are in fact slower than the predecessors, but more energy efficient. Slower trains also made me think of an unforgettable trip from Tokyo to Sapporo on the slow, overnight train, Hokutosei.

My husband and I bought the last sleeper tickets available when we arrived in Tokyo, the transaction seemingly impossible from Melbourne. The gorgeous midnight blue train with golden trim was waiting patiently at the station the day of our departure. We had to make our way through a little collection of train enthusiasts, long lens cameras in hand, to board. Inside we found curtained windows, wooden finishes and banker's lights at the restaurant tables, where we sipped on cherry liqueurs and watched the night go by.

I know it is not about pneumatic tubes, but sometimes it is just nice to travel in the slow lane for a while, rather than be speeding and whizzing along, with those capsules.

p.S. I just found out that the Hokutosei is one of those treasures and joys of travel which have disappeared, the line discontinued in August last year.

Photos my own.

utopian superbuildings

The superhospital is upon us. No, not a hospital for superheroes, nor one that heals lesions with spells like St Mungos, but rather a big big hospital, stretching across and up, networked with dense layers of infrastructure.

Montreal has been long awaiting it's new superhospital, for better or worse, and the wait is now over. The Montreal Gazette reports on the sparkling new facilities, including robotic radiological equipment and "Cyberknives", hybrid operating rooms and yes, of course, pneumatic tubes:

The pneumatic tube system (PTS) doesn't qualify as medical equipment, but it's arguably one of the coolest features of the new hospital ... There is already a smaller such system at the Montreal General Hospital, but the one at the Glen is state-of-the-art and considered the optimum way to transport specimens around a hospital.

The journalist can barely contain their excitement about this "state-of-the-art technology", the coolest addition to the sparkling new superhospital breathlessly discussed.

Many thanks to Long Branch Mike for sending these links!

Image of another utopian megastructure in Montreal, Habitat 67, from AV Design Flikr, under Creative Commons Licence. See the hospital's website for pictures of their system.

fast in an emergency

It took a broken arm unfortunately, to realise how fast things can happen in the Dutch healthcare system. Through a series of relayed messages I went from my GP, to radiology, to emergency before I could open a trashy magazine. Messages travel fast, not only pneumatically. Then look what my husband spied in the emergency department as we waited for my arm to be set in plaster!

hyper testing

Hyperloop Technologies will start testing it's transportation system "of the future" very soon, so WIRED reports. Still being compared to pneumatic tubes, the Hyperloop is gaining more and more press these days.

Forbes recently wrote about the patent implications of the technology. Apparently there have been already 30 inventions related to pneumatic mass transportation, the earliest dating to 1799.

Those interested in reading about the financial details and people managing this project, may want to read this other Forbes article, or for a fascinating review of the new book about the mastermind behind the invention, Elon Musk, see the London Review of Books.

Image of UCLA architecture students' imagined Hyperloopfrom DesignMilk used under a Creative Commons lisence.

zondag post

Zondag, some years ago ...

Thank you Annelies, for the clipping!

"Een bijzonder toestel.". "Algemeen Handelsblad". Amsterdam, 14-03-1886. Geraadpleegd op Delpher op 25-11-2015, http://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010146876:mpeg21:a0070

mecca's tubes

With millions of worshippers visiting Mecca every year, the Saudi government needed to think of a way in which to deal with the crowds and the material consequences of that many people, namely their rubbish. Scattered around the Hajj mosque, visitors will find 400 little holes where they can deposit their trash and have it whisked away by vacuum, underneath the holy site. Read more in WIRED.

Thanks Jess for sending me this link to this fascinating use of tubes!
Image used under Creative Commons lisence, from Mohd Rasim's Flikr page.

a building corresponds

According to the anthropologist Tim Ingold, to correspond is to be human (from Allegra TV, Tim Ingold on the Correspondence of Lives):

"Human lives are carried on alongside the lives of beings of manifold other kinds: we respond to them as they respond to us. Lives, in short, are bound in correspondence, and this is what makes them social"

I can't help but have these words in mind when I read this article about the inter-office correspondence of post through pneumatic tubes, our lives intertwined with the network of tubes:

INTER-OFFICE correspondence is shunted about from one. floor to another with lightning-like rapidity, thanks to the pneumatic-tube system of transferring messages, recently installed in the new skyscraper of a New York insurance company. The various tubes shown in the photo below lead to different offices in the building. If a message from the fifth floor must go to an office on the twelfth, it is shot to the dispatching room shown in the picture, where attendants insert it in the proper tube and it is pneumatically delivered to its destination.

My thanks again to Patryk for pointing me in the direction of this article and the world of the Modern Mechanix, from where this image comes!

coping with demand

Pneumatic tubes made news recently in Montreal, as the system at the McGill University Health Centre suffered from an extremely high workload. CBC News reported that the tubes broke down repeatedly over the summer but that the system had now been tuned to cope with the amount of traffic passing through. It is during moments of breakdown that these infrastructures are made more visible, not only to hospital staff, but the public too; those hidden little doors and pipes that many barely even notice.

My thanks to Robert DeDomenico for permission to use his photos of a hospital pneumatic tube system in Vineland, New Jersey, US. Robert is the inventor of the innovative transport network for small loads that has resemblance to pneumatic tubes, CargoFish Physical Internet.

fast frozen foods

In a chilling account of the American "coldscape" in Cabinet Magazine, Nicola Twilley informs her readers that more than three-quarters of the food consumed in the U.S is processed, packaged, shipped, stored and sold under artificial refrigeration. In a beautifully written piece she traces this coldscape encompassing your home refrigerator, shipping containers, cheese caves, meat lockers, cellars and biobanks.

There could have been another actor in this network, pneumatic tubes. In Long-Haul Trucking and the Technopolitics of Industrial Agriculture, 1945 - 1975, Shane Hamilton describes this possible alternate future, through the coldscape imaginaries of the 1950s; a time when frozen food and refrigeration was seen to revolutionise food disribution and turn vegetable and animal matter into "pure abstractions capable of being transported, sold, and consumed at any time or place":

For example, one agricultural economist, in a fanciful aside in a technical article in 1951, dreamed of a tunnel distribution system whereby homeowners would hook up their freezers to a pneumatic tube that would deliver packages from the frozen food factory on demand (H.J. Humphrey, Temperatures for Frozen Foods, Ice and Refrigeration 121 (August 1951): 52 - 58)"

As my friend Patryk, who sent me this gem, points out "unfortunately long-haul trucks won the competition with pneumatic tubes".

Thanks Patryk for the always fabulous and quirky histories of technologies you send my way, and Alex for the lend of her Cabinet magazine!

Image my own, from the Paris' coldscape underground.

other autumn odours

It was perhaps the most stunning week I have ever spent in Paris. Late summer spreading into early autumn, gentle light and every day blue skies and 20 degrees. It was buttery toast weather, crisp, decadent, soft and delicious.

So where better to head than the damp, dark, pungent sewer system under Paris' pretty streets in search of pneumatic tubes?

As the last traces of light filtered behind us, my husband and I descended into the sewer museum of Paris, Musée des Égouts de Paris, where I had a sense we might find some traces of Paris' postal pneumatic network.

We were not the only ones seeking out Paris' infrastructural splendours that day - there was a father and his two daughters in front of us, father with clipboard in hand furiously taking notes, while the girls became increasingly bored; a young couple who sped through the museum at lightening speed; a group of Dutch tourists sleeves to their noses.



As we worked our way through the tunnels we found magnificent microbiological paintings, a gallery of living art. The cool limescale smell was gradually replaced by tendrils and whiffs of what one may expect from a working sewerage system and soon we encountered the flowing rivers under our feet, washing away the city's waste. But where were the tubes?

We looked everywhere, and in the dark, couldn't see them. But they were there all along, pointed out to us by the man selling postcards near the exit. We turned our flashes on and there was the sign, "Reseau Pneumatique: Pneumatic Network" modestly hung on a winding pipe.

We followed the pipes as far as we could, until we found their sawn-off ends. It was a little glimpse of that vast network that carried millions of petit bleus at its zenith. Just like 19th century tourists of the sewer system, we marvelled at these infrastructural wonders, now rusty and calcified. What will the tourists of the next generation visit - our underground fiber optical webs, another network hidden from view?

All images my own.