I was reading A Coffin for Dimitrios (great book), and found a character saying “send me a pneumatique when you get to Paris.” And in fact, there was a series of pneumatic tubes to speed the mail in Paris for over 100 years. Thought it was cool. Here’s the wiki as well.
Whose the US asshole that sent a cat
In the early 1900s, you could send pretty much whatever could fit in a standard cylinder. Theatre tickets, bills, postcards, novels and cats (yes, this did happen in New York’s pneumatic post) all whizzed around underground and reached their recipient in just an hour.
Name and shame
Cat tax had a little different meaning back then…
Some of those systems are still around. For example, Roosevelt Island in NYC has a pneumatic trash collection system. Apparently it’s the only part of NYC that doesn’t have trash piling up on the streets/sidewalks all the time.
New York almost had a pneumatic subway system, but the inventor tried to go around Boss Tweed. Big mistake.
Pneumatic transit and atmospheric rail were kinda a fad in the 1800s. Even if it had been built it would have mainly been an attraction rather than a mode of transport. They were never really able to hammer out the kinks with maintenance and safety.
Funnily enough an atmospheric rail incident on the Dalkey atmospheric railway was more than likely the first time a human sustained a land speed over 100mph.
The son of the owner accidentally loosed the break on a single carriage that was supposed to convey a whole train and accidentally shot himself off alone, covering about 2 miles of track in less than 75 sec. Which in the 1840’s would have been like engaging a Victorian warp drive.
FWIW there is a modern atmospheric railway in use today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porto_Alegre_Metro#Airport_connection_people_mover
Oh yeah, the people mover is really cool. Always been a goal to actually ride it if I ever make it down to Brazil.
It’s a little bit easier to make them work nowadays with modern materials, rubber is probably a little more pleasant of a sealing material to work with compared to the og bearskin and lard.
Though one of the benefits of the lard is that the og one always smelled like a fry up when in use.
Bearskin and lard?
In 1824, a man called Vallance took out a patent and built a short demonstration line; his system consisted of a 6-foot (1.8 m) diameter cast-iron tube with rails cast in to the lower part; the vehicle was the full size of the tube, and bear skin was used to seal the annular space.
Back in the days before vulcanized rubber and plastics if you wanted to make a somewhat air tight seal you had to soak an animal skin in fat. With the amount of pressure you need to move a train, you need a pretty big and durable animal skin.
A letter from The Central Bureaucracy.
“Attention, Hermes Conrad”
“You are about to receive a letter from The Central Bureaucracy.”
My God!
It’s from The Central Bureaucracy!
The technology is still in use today and new systems are built, e.g. for moving around kab samples in large hospitals or industrial sites. Pretty hard to email those.
Prague did until 2002
This is so steampunk I love it
Prague still has one although it’s not in use any more
THUMP
Probably shut down when someone shit in it
now this is shitposting
Ah, a picture of the internet pipes…
Was an interesting read, things like that just seem so cool
