For someone who was born after , say 1992 , it ’s probably unmanageable to imagine , but there was a time when people did n’t havee - mail , prison cell phones or digital books on Kindle . It dumbfound weird . Back in the sidereal day , the rapid infection of written documents count on something called apneumatic metro .
Our root ' lack of instantaneous communication may make the reality of a hundred or more agone go dispiritedly easy - act . But it did n’t seem that way to them . One grounds was that they did have a mean of transmitting write and printed information — and other physical object as well — in what seemed like a flash . In a signified , it was their version of theInternet , but it was n’t electronic . Instead , they had something called pneumatic tube tape drive — a clump of pipelines in which compress air insistence is used to propel a canister through a pneumatic vacuum tube internet to its specify destination [ source : Library – UC Berkeley ] .
Starting in the mid - to - late 19th century , numerous major cities in the U.S. and other country build up monumental hush-hush networks of pneumatic tube , and rely as heavily upon them as we do upon due east - chain armour today . This pneumatic system work out so well , in fact , New York City ’s postal service office used one to move mail around the metropolis until 1953 , and Berlin had a similar system up and running until 1976 [ source : Web Urbanist ] .
And while pneumatic tube transferral has largely been supplanted by quicker and more convenient electronic methods of beam information , the applied science still has worthful uses . In this article , we ’ll talk about how pneumatic tubes work , what they were once used for , and what they are used for today .
How Compressed Air Moves Stuff
The metallic element - and - glass intricacy of pneumatic tube systems seems like a perfect example of Victorian - earned run average technology , the sort of elaborate period gadgetry that you might see Robert Downey Jr. tinkering with in one of the Sherlock Holmes moving picture . But actually , the idea of pneumatics — that is , using pressurized gas to grow mechanically skillful motion — go back to Hero of Alexandria , a Ptolemaic Greek mathematician , artificer and author who hold up in the first century A.D. [ sources : Merriam - Webster , Britannica ] .
Hero apparently was a jolly observant hombre . He noticed that the steer , even though it did n’t have a visible substance , could push pretty hard on things . That led him to deduct that melody was actually composed of tiny , unseeable , moving " subatomic particle , " what today we call atom . He went on to figure out that if you compressed those moving speck by occlude them into a tight distance or passageway , they ’d attempt to escape , and in the process , crowd a solid object that was in front of them . He also deduced that if you could create a vacuum — basically , an empty distance — that air travel corpuscle would try on to belt along into it . By means of these principles , he wrote , " many curious and astonishing kinds of motion may be discovered " [ informant : Woodcroft ] .
Hero used his understanding of how pressurized gases behave to make gadgets like a primitivesteam engineand a vocalizing miniature boo , but it was n’t until the 1810 that a British technologist , George Medhurst , published a program for a pneumatic tube rapid shipping system [ source : Woodcroft ] .
Medhurst notice that if air was subjected to 40 pounds per straightforward inch of pressure — only about two - and - a - half times the amount that the atmospheric state exerts on us at sea grade — tune molecules would be propelled at 1,500 feet ( 457 beat ) per second , or about 1,000 international mile ( 1,609 klick ) an 60 minutes . When labor a canister , the speed would only be about 100 miles ( 160 kilometers ) an hour , but that was blazingly fast for 1810 [ source : Medhurst ] .
Unfortunately , Medhurst was n’t as good at actually build machinery as he was at design it , and he died in 1827 , before he actually could construct his vision [ source : Stephen and Lee ] .
The Air-powered Internet
In the 1850s , Great Britain ’s General Post Office commission a study of Medhurst ’s conception , and in the 1860s , awarded a contract to engineer T.W. Rammel to make a complex organization to behave mail service throughout London [ informant : Library – UC Berkeley , Grace ’s Guide ] By 1886 , London ’s tube system stretched for 34 nautical mile ( 54.7 km ) underneath the metropolis and carry 32,000 substance a day . letter of the alphabet thrust along at a speed of up to 51 air mile ( 82 kilometers ) per hour — not as fast as what Medhurst had promised , but still speedier than a horse - quarter ring mail wagon [ source : U.S. Congress ] .
By the turn of the 20th century , New York had a pneumatic tube organization that institutionalise cylindrical container containing letters and parcels zip up in a loop under Manhattan at 30 miles ( 48 klick ) per hour . Other cities like Boston , Chicago , Philadelphia and St. Louis had similar systems too [ informant : Library – UC Berkeley ] .
Pneumatic transport seemed so clever that some people purport using it for other thing besides mail . In 1867 , an inventor name Alfred Beach construct and briefly operate a 300 - foot - long ( 91 - cadence - farseeing ) pneumatic tubesubwayunder a incision of Broadway in Manhattan , in hopes that air travel - powered trains would catch on [ rootage : Massachusetts Institute of Technology ] . In 1913 , Waldemar Kaempffert , wield editor program of the honored publishing Scientific American , actually propose the estimate of cooking meals in cardinal kitchens and shipping them via pneumatic subway to the great unwashed ’s homes . " If a alphabetic character can be scoot through pneumatic thermionic vacuum tube from New York to Brooklyn , why not a five - course dinner ? " he sound off .
Just as Edwardian - age folk were starting to really go crazy about this newfangled pneumatic engineering , World War I chop-chop cool down their ardor . The U.S. Post Office freeze the use of pneumatic post exaltation , saying that it used too much fuel to power the air compressor that they needed . After the warfare , the help finally was restored , but only in New York and Boston .
Private companies that would have ramp up fresh systems stopped putting in bid because of all the Congressional regulations and gradually , the existing system ' capacity was surpass by the maturate volume of mail . Instead , the Post Office put its money into post trucks , which had the added reward of transporting mail to locations far more distant than a pneumatic tube system could reach and transporting larger packages . In 1953 , U.S. Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield canceled pneumatic tube ring armour for just , and order the systems dismantled [ source : Cohen ] .
Pneumatic Tubes Today
Pneumatic tube transport never died out completely . As long as people used paper documents and photographs , it was still a practical method of transmitting information inside large building . TheU.S. Central Intelligence Agency(CIA ) , for case , work up a sprawl pneumatic tube system inside its home base in Langley , Va. , in the 1950s , which transmitted 7,500 text file each day throughout the building ’s seven floors . It was n’t shut down until 1989 , when CIA employee had become so reliant upon e - postal service that the tubes were no longer needed [ source : CIA ] .
In the 1970s , companies also began to use heavier , more powerful pneumatic tube systems to transfer materials such as machine parts and even flummox privileged plants [ generator : New Scientist ] . They ’re still widely used in industry for such determination [ root : Air Link International ] . And Sir Joseph Banks still have pneumatic tube systems at their take - up windows , which enable customers to make cash deposit or withdrawals from the quilt of their cars [ source : Farber ] .
More of late , pneumatic tube systems have become pop in hospitals because they can be used to rush tissue and origin sampling from a science lab in a upstage part of the complex , far faster than a person could do on metrical foot . Stanford University ’s hospital , for example , has installed a organization with 4 mi ( 6.4 kilometers ) of air tubes , and use it to transport 7,000 specimens each day . They ’ve even wedded the nineteenth - century wonder to 21st - C engineering , by equipping the subway system with a digital monitoring system of rules that allows infirmary staff to watch the advancement of their canister shot to its goal on a data processor screen door [ author : Wykes ] .
Lots More Information
Back when I became a newspaper reporter in the mid-1980s , my then - employer , the Pittsburgh Press , in reality still had a pneumatic tube system , which it used to channelise exposure from the wire services printers to the sports section . I was in the features section , but my desk was the right way next to the pneumatic tube vena portae . Every so often — commonly , as I was in the middle of an important phone consultation or adjudicate to compose a pithy steer — I would learn this loud , rocket - ship - corresponding swoosh , follow by the clunk of the glass and metal canister arriving . It was a bit jarring , and at the time , I obtain it annoying . But today , I have to allow that I ’m a little nostalgic about that sound , because pneumatic tubes pretty much have vanish , and sadly , so has the Pittsburgh Press .
