A Series of Tubes

Image from Wikimedia, Figuier, Les Merveilles de la science, 1867–1891, Tome 5.djvu

Although widely ridiculed for the statement, the late Alaska Senator Ted Stevens was right when he said, “The Internet is a series of tubes.” He was just off by a century.

Starting in the mid to late nineteenth century, pneumatic tube postal services linked post-telegraph offices with each other in every major financial hub in the world, on every continent but Antarctica. As improbable as it seems, propelling messages through hundreds of kilometers of subterranean tubes and pipes was a good solution for delivering messages across a busy city jammed with carriages and motorcars. The first pneumatic post system opened in London in 1853; New York’s pneumatic post shuttled first-class mail across the Brooklyn Bridge till 1953, its postal workers called “rocketeers”; the Prague system was in operation till 2002. Paris’s Poste pneumatique was the most extensive, encompassing some 450 kilometers of tubes in 1945, and it wasn’t until 1984 that telephone service became reliable enough to merit shutting down the Poste pneumatique. There were pneumatic postal systems in more than sixty cities around the globe.

Thanks to the 1910 patented invention of the electric Gissot motor that weighed a mere 400 pounds (compared to the 3,300-pound engines of the steam age), pneumatic tubes could be installed inside buildings. The Lamson pneumatic tube brochure from 1920 bragged that Sears Roebuck sent 135,900 messages a day via pneumatic tube. A double stereoscopic postcard from the time shows its long lines of parallel pneumatic tubes popping out of the card in 3D. Pneumatic tubes became the conduit for moving messages, bills, money, checks, and goods, for air traffic, rail, and mission control, for lollipops and doggie treats.

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My mom drove up at the new First Bank Grand auto-banking lane in St. Paul, cranked open the window of our tan 1977 Datsun 510, and pulled into the car a heavy plastic cylinder ten inches long and four inches across with rubber on each end. She opened the latch on the canister door, slipped in the checks she’d just endorsed, latched it closed, and returned it to the dark brown plastic-and-metal box. A loud fan sucked the canister underground. The teller waved at us from across the lanes, and my brother, Andy, and I lifted the paw of Pepper, our gray schnauzer- poodle, to wave back at her. The fan started up again and launched the carrier through fifty feet of tubes.

US Patent 4,059,246, for the “Pneumatic Tube Banking System,” was granted to Diebold on November 22, 1977, four days before my sixth birthday, and it describes the system as I remember it. The inventors, Walter Anders, Michael Cole, James Duncan, and Paul Leipelt, all of Canton, Ohio, according to the patent, write in the abstract:

A pneumatic tube system for conducting banking transactions with a noncaptive carrier traveling between a bank teller terminal in a two-tube carrier conveyor connected with a remote customer terminal with visual communication between the teller and the customer. The terminals and tube structure and their components are combined, interrelated, and cooperatively arranged with simple and inexpensive construction to provide quiet and reliable operation. Prior complex carrier delivery and dispatch holding and release devices and blower operating timers and controls are eliminated. The operation of a blower located at the customer terminal, which supplies air for pressure or vacuum movement of the carrier in the two-tube system, is controlled by carrier arrival at or dispatch from either terminal. Noise emanating from air currents in the system is reduced by mufflers located at the terminals in the tube system. The carrier moves through one of the mufflers during travel. The terminals are readily accessible for repair of contained devices.

There are forty-three drawings accompanying the patent, including a drawing of the system in section, showing the tellers, the tubes, the driver- side station, even the blocky 1970s cars at the drive-through. What the drawings don...