020913pneu

 "What we need.. is a pneumatic distribution network, and now is the perfect time to install one, while the gas company has the streets dug up anyhow. Pneumatics was a big item in Paris and London in the 1880s", muses Don Cox in The Blue Box (Recycled Ideas).

What is a pneumatic messaging system? He explains further. "It's just a network of tubes of various sizes with a controlled vacuum but it carried mail quickly and efficiently and was the equal of the fax any day. You wrote your message and put it in a little round cylinder about the size of a flashlight. You lifted the gate valve on the pneumatic tube, slipped in the message cylinder and "S-S-L-U-RRR-P-P", it was gone, and it would drop on the addressee's desk a minute or two later. It was a fabulous system." He seems to have witnessed the transport himself! Hence this unreserved admiration

"The first pneumatic mail tube (1.5 inch diameter, 220 yards long) was installed underground by Josiah Latimer Clark between London Stock Exchange and Central Telegraph Office in 1854", Dr T. Matthew Ciolek records. A steam engine was used. Cylindrical message carriers moved with the speed of 20 feet/sec. The tube is used in place of the most busy short-range telegraph lines

By 1866 Pneumatic tube networks were built in Dublin, Marseilles, Milan, Munich, Naples, New York, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, and Vienna . The 3 inch pneumatic mail tube became the norm eventually. It can move up to 60 messages at a time. One such tube is an equivalent of 7 telegraph wires and 14 operators working flat out.

Has the system been deployed for carrying solid material other than the post? Yes, records www.deadmedia.org, in its working notes in the context of the Chicago's dead tunnels. Now abandoned, or probably accommodating the new wave optical fibers, the tunnels in the Loop district carried supplies and many times garbage on two feet tracks. They were superseded by the metro, abandoned in 1959 and later in 1992 got flooded before being given up once for all.

"Today, the pneumatic post survives only in Paris and Italy", says a report (of 1974) by J.D. Hayhurst O.B.E. in his Pneumatic Post of Paris. The Paris network obtains the honor for being the most famous pneumatic post. For generations the pneumatic letter-card was known affectionately as the petit bleu since, between 1897 and 1902, it was on blue paper. It was under this name that a telegramme became a vital piece of evidence in the inquiries that led to the eventual acquittal of Dreyfus.

The standard work in France on the pneumatic post is considered to be Cent ans de tubes pneumatiques, JBoblique, Echo de la Timbrologie, 1966. The engineering aspects of the service are recounted in Le reseau pneumatique de Paris, M Gaillard, Revue des PTT de France, 1, 1959.

While the Paris network was the most famous, Berlin network is considered to be the most comprehensive. It is a vague recollection that Readers' Digest also carried a story on the pneu.

The pneu made its reluctant appearance on the Central Telegraph Offices at the Bombay Calcutta and Madras metros (within the building). Why should it be associated only with telegraphy is not immediately evident. History also records that professionals from US of A were sent often to Europe for being trained in this trade. The pneumatic tubes may currently (that is in the twenty first century) be seen in many banks between the drive-in terminals and the counters far inside.

"George Medhurst, a London businessman, is considered the earliest proponent of pneumatic-powered railways although there were a few earlier, brief suggestions from others. He first published a freight proposal in 1810, a passenger proposal in 1812, and a more comprehensive set of proposals in 1827" [observes Dead Medium: Freight Tubes, by bretts@earthlight.co.nz (Brett Shand) and quotes the following source : Tube Freight Transportation by Lawrence Vance and Milton K. Mills http://www.tfhrc.gov/pubrds/fall94/p94au21.htm ]

After World War II, larger pneumatic systems were developed and built in Japan and Russia to move bulk materials such as limestone and garbage. These systems had considerably greater throughput as a result of both their increased diameters of 0.9 to 1.2 m (3 to 4 ft) and their mode of operation, which allowed more capsules to move through the tube at one time. By the early 1970s, several groups began to give consideration to the use of these pipeline designs for common carrier, general merchandise freight applications using tubes 1.2 to 1.8 m (4 to 6 ft) in diameter. Several were in operation by the eighties.