A Series of Tubes Part One

do an episode on pneumatics too. Yeah, and I was the one who wrote that thing, and I said, hey, this is a two minute video. Uh, this isn't really covering everything I think there is to say about pneumatic tubes. So Jonathan, why don't we do a tech stuff episode about right instead of a two minute video, We're going to make a two part episode because we have ten

pages of notes. I think I think that that is officially the most notes we have ever compiled on anything, except for maybe D M C A or A T and T or one of those big like three parts. Yeah. Yeah, those those definitely get pretty intense. But it was interesting that we can actually because you think pneumatic tubes, especially people who have have had any kind of uh interaction with these, like a drive through bank teller type thing, You wouldn't think that would necessarily end up being Yeah,

but as it turns out, one, it's super cool. I'm fascinating, Yes, and to it there's a rich history, oh yeah, of being used in lots of different ways. So one of the cool things that you brought to light is that, uh, you know that these are not just little systems that are used within like that bank that drive a single building to take your bank receipt to the teller when you don't feel like getting out of your car, right, That these actually used to be and in some cases

maybe still are much more extensive. Yeah. See, there used to be these huge networks of tubes buried beneath the cities that let people send messages to each other faster than ever before. Yeah, I've heard of this the Internet. It's a it's a series of tubes. Uh no, No, before before the Internet are pannet but that was only like three computers and it was it was wow. Yeah, pneumatic tubes date back quite a ways. And so yeah, when when Lauren said, we're going to talk about a

series of tubes. I thought we were going to talk about the whole you know, good old Senator Ted from Alaska talking about how the Internet is a series of tubes, which, by the way, just for the record, I think is a decent analogy. Yeah, yeah, I mean it was. I mean, it is funny, but it was. And also, as it turns out, some telecom cables are currently being housed in old neumatic tubes, so it is yeah, awesome. So what

exactly is a pneumatic tube. Well, it is a pipeline that uses air pressure to move a canister from one point to another. Okay, that seems pretty simple. So like it seems pretty simple, but wait, there's more, uh there? Yeah, I mean, these things have come a very long way as technology has advanced up. Motors have advanced. Motors started existing, Like like electricity wasn't really a thing when nematic tubes

started up. Computers happened, right, And actually you might think, well, computers would end up, you know, making the whole purpose of these things obsolete, but that's not the case. In fact, there's still very high tech pneumatic tube systems that are at play in various locations for good reasons, And it turns out that the computers aren't necessary elements in that

in order to be kind of like traffic control. So it's kind of cool that this thing that we would normally think was replaced by computers is actually complementing them in specific use cases. Obviously, if you want to send a message to your friend across town, you're more likely to either drop a letter in the mail or much more likely to send the message. But there are many important uses for pneumatic tubes. Um. We only get into many of those later. First, let us talk specifically about

how pneumatic tubes work. Yeah, let's talk about the physics what is going on with a pneumatic tube? And so walk me through the you wrote. You've you've described an excellent way of thinking through this so that we have a logical progression to get to the actual mechanics of pneumatic tubes. Okay, So, pneumatic, in case you don't know, means works via pressurized gas. Basically, Um, So the air around us seems pretty thin, right, but it's actually a soup.

It's actually a liquid made up of lightweight atoms and particles like nitrogen and oxygen and argon and carbon dioxide and ozone and dust bunnies and et cetera. Yeah, yeah, uh, And that soup is at pretty much constant density and pressure around us while we're walking around on Earth's surface, though it's a little bit thinner. The further away from sea level you get, right, Right, the higher you climb on a mountain, for example, the less dense the air.

Thus you have let lower air pressure at those altitudes. Right. And it's useful to think about that because one great way of thinking about air pressure and how it helps stuff work is by thinking of how your ears pop when you go up in a really tall elevator or or up a mountain or up in an airplane. Um. And that's because your your ears pop because of the density of the air outside of your body being lower

than the density of the air in your ears. Okay, You've got this little tube of air in your in your head called the station tube, and it lets your it lets your ear drum vibrate, which is important for your ear drum to function. Right. That's what allows you to interpret sound, right, because sound is a physical uh phenomenon. It vibrates the ear drum, which makes some celia go, well, yeah,

that signals the brain that exactly. Yeah, we're just gonna re enact once more with feeling line by line, But no, it does. You know. The ear drum is what ends up causing these other bones in your in your ear to move in such a way that celia inside of this one container, uh, start to vibrate fluctuate, and that sends electrical signals to your brain, which then is interpreted as sound. So without that vibration, you don't hear, uh, And without this tube you wouldn't get that vibration. That

would have nothing to vibrate against. It would just be all solid meat and that doesn't vibrate as well. Yeah, yeah, I mean sound can travel through solids, but it's not as effective going from air to solid then from solid to solid, so right, you know it's important. So the C station tube is shut off with muscles that are tied into your mouth, throat swallowing muscles. This is one of those things I always thought was weird that that our ears are connected to I mean, the human bodies

gross y'all, especially the sinus type system. Yeah, and that's that's why if you swallow, you hear like a tiny little pop, and that is the muscles of that tube opening up and and letting a fresh supply of air in, which is important because the air that gets into the tube gets absorbed by the walls of the tube, and so it needs to be replenished periodically. That's also why your head hurts so much when when you have a cold, because those muscles get stuffed up by gunk and you

can't replenish that air supply and everything hurt. When you're like I can't hear because I have a cold, it seems weird because yeah, yeah, that's because the because your ear drum literally cannot vibe rate because there's not a replenishment of air in the tube. That's kind of cool. I mean, I had never thought of it that way. So interesting. Okay, so all of this is a sidebar promise. We're getting back to neumatics. Um. So, so as you gain altitude, the air inside of your ears starts exerting

pressure on those membranes. Um, it starts pushing because it's at that higher density than the air outside. Um. You know, it wants to be chill like that lower pressure air. You never let it hang loose. Yeah, when you create this pressure differential than there. That's where you're starting to get that feeling of something's just kind of like you

get that ache. You can get pretty painful too, if you especially like you know, you hear about babies and kids having real problems because they haven't figured out how to voluntarily open up their irustration tube. Yeah. And so when the difference in pressure is great enough that you either volunteerly or involuntarily open up that illustration tube, that the sudden release of that pressurized air is pretty forceful and creates that pop. That's when your um But that

is just one example of pressure at work around us. Uh. This next one that I've got for you is a little bit more technical. Are you ready? Yeah? Okay, straws like what the pig built his house out of drinking straw Okay, so crazy straws in my case, but yeah, sure sure, crazy straws totally. So you're not technically pulling liquid up through a straw. You're you're creating an opportunity for the liquid to push itself up. So I'm motivating

the liquid that you're motivating the liquid. Yeah, exactly. The section that you apply with your mouth creates an area of low pressure at the top of the straw, which means that the relatively high pressure liquid at the bottom of the straw pushes a sip of your drink up

into your mouth. Well, this is really interesting to me because I talked about a similar thing with Josh Clark when we covered how toilets work, because we had to talk about siphoning and the siphoning and uses a similar principle and it does require this difference in pressure as well. So very interesting. So how does this compared to say,

pneumatic tubes. Well, it's it's basically the same thing. Um. The the tube part is air tight like a straw, except it has sealable hatches at either end instead of you know straw. Bit's yeah. Um, so so you you put a canister in one hatch. Yeah, it helps a whole lot off. The canister has some kind of like flexible skirts on either end, the concealed to the interior edges of the tube. That air is not passing around around the canister right to make it the most effective.

So you so you put your canister in there, you close the hatch, and you press your go button. Um. Now, on the other end of the tube, pressing that button will open up a vent and start a motor. Now one of two things will happen at this point, right, So this all depends upon where the canister is in relation to where the blower is. So here's the boring one, because because you get to take the really cool one. Here's the boring one if the canister is on the

blower side. So in other words, this is like the blower being a fan essentially that can either blow air into the tube or pull air out of the tube if it's on the blower side, and the only way to move the canister to the other end of the tube is to blow air against the canister pushing it, so you're increasing the air pressure on the side of

the blower and it just blows the canister across. So this is essentially the same as when you shoot blow darts at your coworkers, or when I say you when I shoot blow darts at Ben bowling, Um, he has wondered what that tingling sensation has been and no one tell him. But that's essentially it. So yeah, but if the canisters on the opposite side, see, the blower on a pneumatic tube system typically is at just one end. You don't have two blowers right right, And it's not um.

Especially classically, these things weren't always powerful enough to necessarily push at right. So if the canisters on the opposite end, like I, I've sent something out now, I'm expecting it to come back, but my blower is at the the end where I am at, I have to I have to find a different way to move the canster. I can't push it by by turning the fan to blow

air into the tube. So what do I do then? Well, the motor will still drive a fan down at the other end of the tube, but but this time it will start to pull air out of the tube, venting it out of the tube entirely. Got okay, This section, just like a straw, creates a partial vacuum at that end of the tube with the fan an area of

low pressure. So uh, you know, down down at the canister end of the tube, the higher pressure air behind the canister wants to expand to settle the difference, right, um, So it will push the canister through the two So the cancer is still being pushed. It's just that it's being pushed because the air behind it is at a higher pressure. Than the air in front of it, exactly.

It's so cool. So in most of these systems, when the canister reaches its destination um like the end of the tube, it will trigger a trapdoor to close behind it, which will also que the motor to turn off end the vnced close, meaning that the partial vacuum that's been created in the tube will be broken and your buddy at the other end can open up the hatch and

take out the canister. And that makes perfect sense because obviously if you had continue to have that vacuum they're opening up the hatch would have been difficult, it real hard, yeah, because that that air pressure on the outside of the tube is pushing against it. You know. It's this same sort of deal. That's just one of those things that you have to have all the lower parts in place for the system to work properly. And the big advantage of this sort of system is that you don't have

to connect little motors to all those canisters, right. The individual units don't need anything, they don't need any moving parts. Yeah, the whole the system is a whole can have a single well, it can have a single motor. A lot of the time these days they've got really complex multiple motor things going on, especially if you have like lots

of potential destinations. But but if you had a very simple system where it was just an out and back, you would just need one one motor turning one fan or or you know, some people just refer to him as air compressors, but technically you're using a fan anything fan. Yeah. So, yeah,

that's really interesting. And there are also some interesting advantages or rather design elements that have been made to make sure that the canisters arrived safely, right, because in the original systems, canisters would arrive by basically just crashing into the opposite end of the two Yeah, they and they could be going pretty darn fast, depending on how powerful

that fan was. Yeah, tens of miles an hour, which which I mean usually I say is kind of a joke, but actually that's pretty quick, Yeah, especially for something like if you haven't designed it just right, it's gonna you know, just just smash it up, yeah, or it's gonna end up causing damage to the tubes. And obviously that's a problem. So there are a couple of different ways of slowing

them down properly. One of those uses air brakes, which is essentially just again pressurized air, but now on the low pressure side, so that can slow down the canister from you know, it's it's inevitable crash towards oblivion, or bumpers like little rubber bumpers that can come out from the sides to slow like the way a lot of roller coaster brakes work. Huh. And also they often have some form of switch that once a castor passes that switch,

it activates it, which then turns off power to the blower. Uh. Now, momentum still a thing, so you have to plan for that as well. But yeah, yeah, it's sort of like the trapdoor idea, but with a little bit of a longer glide after the trapdoor. Right, So now I'm going to try and explain without the use of visual aids, how how a simple pneumatic tube system using a couple of valves and a switch would help a canister come to a stop. All right, So, uh, you've got with

the two valves. These create a pathway for air in front of the canister to vent out for most of the trip, while leaving enough for the very end to act as a cushion. So in other words, you need a way for air to vent outward or else you'll never create that area of low pressure. But you need a way to keep a little bit of air in there so that it can act as a breaking system. So you've got to figure out how to do that. And when I saw there was a a series of

illustrations I saw online that explained this really well. And uh so I'm going to try and walk you through it the best way I know how. So we're playing Dungeons and Dragons, y'all, and here's here's what's happening. So your adventurer is in a tunnel and behind you as a giant spinning fan of death. Oh yeah, I think I've been on this module before. Okay, So in this case, the giant spinning fan of death is currently slow. It's it's actually not even moving at all. It's it's no

one's tripped that trap yet. You start walking down the tunnel. So the fan is behind you and you just have a big, expansive tunnel in front of you. Now, as you walk down the tunnel, you see that there is a split from the tunnel off let's say to your left, and it's just a second, smaller tunnel that you seek kick down the door. No, no, no, there's no door. It's just just an open it's just an opening. But but I like your initiative. You didn't even have to

roll for it, all right. But you continue on down and you come to your first actual door in that main tunnel. Now you can do your kicking, and it works because that door will only open outward into the main hall. This is a valve, and it's a one way valve, right, so air can go from the fan through the main pipe, but it can't be sucked back this way, got it. So if airs, if airs being pulled, that door slam shut and nothing, not even your mighty kick will open it. So since there are no differentials

in air pressure, your kick opens the door. You continue down the hall. I'm gonna skip the cobalt encounter. As you continue down the tunnel, you see a door on your left. Now, this door is the other valve. This is the valve, that is the bypass valve. And in fact, if you were to kick down that door, but you can do oh ah, yeah, I kicked down the door. Excellent. So the door opens inward into that secondary tunnel. There's no bugbears there is an al bear, but he's currently

on break. So you kick down the door. UH. That opens the pathway to the bypass UH top tube or bypass pipe. So the first tunnel that you passed way back when on the left, it's the same it's that same pathway. So this door will only open when air is being pulled through back towards the fans speak suck back toward the fan. So that way you always have one valve that's open and one valve that's closed, and it all depends upon air flow. So there's no mechanical

or electrical need to to change these valves. It's just the airflow that does it automatically. So if the air flow is being pulled back, the bypass valve is open, the main valve is shut, and because the bypass pipe completely bypasses that main valve, air can still flow through. So now we're going to have to use a an example to talk about what happens when the canister comes by. So the canister starts rocketing down the path toward the fan side, so air is being pulled through. It ends

up passing a switch. That switch tells the fan to stop blowing by. Of course, that's going to take a little time. So the cancer continues down towards the pathway. The canister ends up passing that bypass valve which is open.

So once the canistor is cleared the bypass valve, because you have an air tight seal between the main valve and the canister, that air between the two starts to get compressed, and that compressed air begins to push back against the canister, slowing it down, and thus you have air brakes. That was a long way to go for that explanation, but honestly, without the use of visual aids, I wasn't sure how it is going to explain how this actually works in a way that would remotely make sense.

Uh you now get two d and thirty gold pieces a piece and the princesses in another castle. Okay, okay, well, good adventure. You're welcome. I'm on a level three gamester um. Yeah. So obviously, if the if the fan were switched the other way where the canstor is blowing down the the pipe, the main valve would be opened, the bypass valve would be shut, and that would be it. There would it would be no different otherwise? Uh So, yeah, that's that's the basic way that this works. And that's you know,

that's a very very very simple version. And yeah, as as complicated as that just sounded out loud, that that is as basic as it gets. Really. Yeah, you know, I I said a while ago that these things have been around since the eighteen fifties at least. So let us go to the way back machine and it's been out of use for so long. Kind of dusty in here this little yeah you know what, as as as cramped as this thing is, it's still cooler than Josh and Chuck Studio. I mean not not like in a

style sense, I mean physically the temperature is lower. Physically, yeah, cooler, Yeah, yeah that No, they they're they're pretty hot, yeah they are. There are a couple of hot guys. All right, Well, anyway, let's just where are we setting this to? Uh too? To Greece? Sure, well, okay, like ancient Greece, modern Grease. Okay, I was really hoping you were going to say Greece too, but okay, to Grease it is. Here we go. Well, we do have chills and they are multiplying, but that

was Greece. One. I'm sorry, I don't remember any lyrics don't want to. It's it says a lot for you and little for me. So there was a mathematician who started writing about the concept of using pressurized guess to produce mechanical motion. I know this guy, Yeah, Hero of Alexandria, also known as Heron. He's a pretty smart dude, was he did you? You know, we talked about it. He is.

Since we are here in the way back missions and he's across the street over there, he's kind of working on something else right now, Yeah, I think we're weirding about by looking at him and maybe okay, well, let's just act casual, all right, So something else that he was really known for, by the way, he was known

for working with steam engines, in fact, pressurized gas. It makes sense right related He noticed that air had the ability to physically push against things, and that if you had a way of generating air movement, you know, he even thought, oh, air must be made of something because

it can have a force, so very forward thinking. He didn't have the words to describe this in the way that we do today, but he understood that this had a way of doing work, and that if you could find a way to channel that, you can make air do work for you, and that gave him a lot of thought about steam, including one of my favorite proposed inventions. There's no record of it actually existing, and I think we I think we talked about this one in our

episode about steam engines. Yeah, I'm pretty sure we did. This is the magical way to open temple doors. And so you start with a flaming brazure, which is a container that contains hot coals essentially, and you have that connected to a boiler. The boiler boils water, water is converted into steam. That steam goes through a long tube that's essentially a condenser tube. It condenses back into water

and starts dripping into a bucket. When enough of water has dripped into that bucket, that bucket, which is suspended by a rope from a pulley, starts to get heavier and heavier pulling downward, and that pulley system ends up turning a couple of columns that open up the temple doors. So by lighting a fire and and sacrificing something to the gods, eventually the doors open and it's magic. Uh,

it was pretty brilliant. He's he actually came up with a lot of different really cool ideas, um, and so you know, we definitely wanted to call him out, but then we have to skip ahead a couple of you know, like a millennia or two. You know, oh yeah, you know, you know how it goes with science during some of those intervening years between telem increase and say that the Renaissance, you know, back when everyone suddenly said, hey, remember when we used to be smart. We liked that. It was great.

You know, we were a lot a lot fewer of us were dying of the plague back then. We liked that time. That was good. Yeah. So a fellow by the name of Dennis Poppine, I think that's how you said that, would present a paper on an invention that he or an idea that he was calling the double pneumatic pump to the Royal Society of London. That's pretty that's pretty. That's a pretty impressive name, the double double pneumatic. It's twice as good as it isn't clearly obviously, um.

But nothing more would come of this until the early nineteenth century. Yeah, that's when there was a Scottish engineer by the name of William Murdoch. I have to mention William Murdock, because while while he had essentially invented the pneumatic tube, he didn't do a whole lot with it. It was some of his I hesitated to use the word like students because they weren't even apprentice to him.

But people who worked within the same field, who were exposed to his ideas were able to actually implement them. But he was the one who came up with the concept of using a pneumatic tube in the early nineteenth century, and others would take that idea and run with it. Yeah, namely one British engineered by the name of George Medhurst. He would publish a plan in eighteen ten for a

pneumatic transport system. Now let me ask you, is this the one where you like, you get in the tube and you press a button and then you just fly across. So it's not like in futurama. I know now that would hurt a lot. I don't recommend it. Yeah, well, okay, so they're downside. I mean, clearly you really need that air brake system to work really well, and your ears would pop like a mother true. Yeah, being being being subjected to extremely low pressure on one half of your

body might not have the best effect overall. All right, fair enough, Okay, So so he was so he was working with a compressed air. Yeah, he actually created as something called the Alien engine in eight hundred, which was a kind of like a car running on a compressed air in a way, it was a vehicle that used compressed air on the vehicle itself to create a system

of propulsion to make the vehicle move. So in this case, the the you know, like we said, with the pneumatic tube is one of the big advantages is that you have the centralized source of power. This was the other way around. This is more like more akin to a motor vehicle. So but he that was an early experiment of his that didn't necessarily work out, you know, as like this is going to be the new means of transportation.

But he was recognizing the power of compressed air. So then he moved on to create a design for this pneumatic transport system. And it consisted of an iron tube that was six ft high by six ft wide, which is about one point eight meters each and I had rails along the bottom of this tube, so cars would be set on the rails and then blown through the

tubes using compressed air. So essentially the style that we were talking about, the the the easy, more boring method of getting canisters from point A to point B. But he did he did note that he did the math and sussed it out and and thought that if air could be subjected to just forty pounds per square inch of pressure, just um, it's it's about two and a half times the amount that the atmosphere exerts upon us

right now hanging out at sea level. Um, if we could increase that two and a half times, the air molecules could be propelled at like a thousand miles an hour or a thousand, six hundred and nine kilometers. You're welcome, Canada and else. Uh, when actually pushing stuff that is an air, that speed would only be about a hundred miles or a hundred and sixty kilometers per hour, which it's still pretty fast. Certainly in like eighteen ten was

not too shabby, it's now No. Unfortunately, he would pass away before he really had a chance to implement any of these ideas, but his ideas would become instrumental for people who were working on actual implementations. Right. Yeah, So uh, one of the one of the interesting stories I came across, and I was telling Lauren before we went into the podcast studio that this, the stories of these people probably

could merit a couple of episodes. Maybe I'll mention it to Stuffy miss in History because it really fits more in their line than ours. But I want to talk about Simuda and Clegg. So you had the Simuda Brothers. That was a company that was run by Jacob and Joseph Simuda who were primarily shipbuilders, so they were engineers, but they built ships. Then they partnered with another inventor and engineer named Samuel Clegg, who at one time and worked in a company that used a lot of William

Murdock's inventions. So Clegg had been exposed to Murdock's ideas. Some people refer to him as as as Murdoch's student, although from all the research which I did, it didn't seem like they had a very like each other. Yeah, it's kind of like saying Tesla worked for Edison in the sense that yes, Tesla worked for one of Edison's companies, but was not like directly associated with most of his life for Coffee with the Dude, No, especially by the time they ended up being kind of rivals. But but

even in the early days they didn't. It's not like Edison knew everybody to work for him anyway. So their their idea was to lease some already constructed but unopened rail lines. So the idea was they took some rail lines that had not yet been open to the public. They had been built but not used, and they were at a place called Wormholt Scrubs, at least that's what was known by at the time. It is now known

as Wormwood Scrubs two instead of one. Yeah, And they used a pipe set between the two rails as their pneumatic system. So instead of an entire huge pneumatic tube encompassing the rails, there was a smaller pneumatic tube set right in the middle of the rails, and the tube had a slot running all the way the length of the tube at the top of it. All right, So you're they had a train car that had a pole that essentially extended down into that slot and was attached

at the other end inside the tube to a piston. Okay, so this is like a pneumatic monorail, Yeah, exactly. The piston acted like a canister would in a normal pneumatic tube and then you sit there and think like, well, how do you create the difference in pressure if you've got to if you've got a slot all the way across the open top of this two, Yeah, there's no

there's no way to seal it. So what they did was they created a leather flap that would essentially be opened immediately before and close immediately after the the rod

would pass through. And uh, the the track they were using was on a very gentle slope, and so what they did was they used to push the train car up the slope to its destination and then on the return trip, they just allowed gravity to bring the car back, so you didn't have to have any sort of power to bring back the car um and it was used pretty extensively as kind of a demonstration. Uh, this sort of this kind of track was starting to get a name.

Is called atmospheric railways. That's beautiful. Yeah. The reason they wanted to call it atmospheric was that, yes, they're using they're using pressurized air, but the cars themselves can be open to the air, so you're not forced inside a tunnel. Because a lot of people were worried about getting you know, claustrophobic. Yeah, you know, not all of us do well in tunnels. Um,

they can be certainly. So other atmospheric railways would follow, including some built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who we talked about on tech stuff in How Subways Work. That was the seven episode. So he was famous for a lot of reasons, one of them being that he dug the Thames Tunnel, so he really um kind of pioneered the methodology for digging tunnels safely, especially under you know, ground that you would technically think would be really unstable like

the bottom of a river. Um. And one of his trains, at least from a report I read during a demonstration, hit a top speed of seventy miles per hour, which

is about a hundred thirteen kilometers per hour. But keeping that seal effective even with those leather flaps was problematic, and so eventually because of these issues, the fact that you had to replace that seal often uh ended up meaning that when steam engines really started to become popular, the pneumatic train systems like these couldn't compete, and so people just started to go with steam engines that were seen as a reliable than something that you had to

constantly maintain. So ultimately, um, they I was gonna say these didn't go anywhere, but that's not true. They go from one place to another place. Sure they went places, but they just didn't take off. No, No, they literally

did not take literally and figuratively. Yes. Okay. Meanwhile, in the eighteen fifties, telegraph systems began to really boom, um, which I mentioned a for reference and be because it's important to note that in these early days of telegraphs, you know, they it was really cool technology, um, but they were really understaffed, uh, telegraph telegraph offices, you know, because there was so much demand and most people in

businesses couldn't afford to have their own telegraph machine. So central offices would send these message boys on foot through busy city blocks carrying all of these telegrams, which would kind of negate to depending on you know, like like peak capacity, the speed of of a telegraph versus a mail system. The idea of being that hey, I can send this message instantly, except I'm sending it instantly to a centralized point and then from there where someone else

has to run it out to you. Anyway, So in eighteen fifty three, Latimer Clark would build a non electric pneumatic tube that would carry messages between the electric and international telegraph companies headquarters and their offices at the British Stock Exchange. And yes, a lot of telegraphs were stock related. As we have talked about on the show before, stock exchanges kind of drive message technology. It's crazy the idea that you want to pounce on something as soon as possible,

whether that's buying or selling. So it makes sense that they were really working to try and decrease the amount of time between a decision and when it can be acted upon. Um so as tubes Lattimer Lattimer Clark's tubes were only one way most most tubes up to this point were so in other words, once it got to its destination, it had to be carried back physically to

wherever the first office. And around the same time, the Great Britain General Post Office would commission a study of Medhurst's ideas to try to to get some kind of larger postal tube system, right, something that could make the delivery of letters more efficient. Yeah, because I mean this is again we've talked about this, uh in the Subways episode in particular. We talked about it, how this is

the same period where London was experiencing explosive population growth. Yeah, it's the Industrial Revolution when suddenly there are fewer there's fewer need of farmers and there's a greater need of labor in various ways in the cities and the urban areas. So you had this migration of people into cities, plus the you know, the fact that people still make people.

So there was that too going on and uh and so we have this this world where everything's getting more complicated because suddenly there's just so many more people living in the same physical space as before. Yeah. So so in the eighteen sixties, the GPO would award a contract to one tw Rammell to construct anumatic two system that could carry mail throughout London. And Ramball's done some really interesting stuff. In eighteen sixty three, RAMA would build a

two foot gage pneumatic dispatch railway in central London. More and then a bit because it takes a couple of years before it opens. But in eighteen sixty four Rambles Crystal Palace pneumatic railway opened. What so, Crystal Palace is sect area in London. It's a location in London. Um, so it wasn't The pneumatic railway itself was not a

crystal palace. It would have been phenomenal, right. So it ran on a track that was about six hundred yards in length, that's around five and the train cars had colored bristles to help create a seal in a ten ft diameter or a three meter diameter tunnel. So kind of similar to those flexible skirts we were talking about earlier, except in this case was bristly. Yeah. Uh So this massive fan would blow the carriage down onto one end of the track. Then the fan would reverse to create

a partial vacuum to bring the carriage back. So it used both principles of pneumatic tubes, and a trip cost sixpence in a song or or just a sixpence. Yeah. I always think of like Oliver, you know, I think of like a dickensie and musical when I think about the stuff. In fact, I want to write one now at any rate. That's that's a good hobby next time on a very musical. Oh man, now you guys are gonna request me to never saying I know that. So it operated for just two years and depending upon whom

you ask. It might or might not have intended to serve as a model for an atmospheric railway, but in a different sense, because obviously this one was completely encapsulated in the tunnel, as opposed to the ones that had the tube that ran parallel well in between the rails. So this is one the rails are completely encapsulated in the two. There are a couple of cool urban legends

about what happened to this particular railway. So one says it was just sealed off, that that once it stopped being used, they sealed off the tunnel, and that in fact, there is this lone tunnel underneath London where if you were able to get access to it, you would see the tracks and even the carriage itself. There was a lady who even reported that she had found it and there were skeletons sitting in the carriage dressed in Victorian outfits. Yeah,

I don't know, Like we're shutting her down. Don't let anybody out. We're shutting off the lights and leaving. Yeah, you got your sixpence is long? You are on the wrong train. That sounds like a Stephen King story. Um. There's another urban legend that said the tunnel collapsed from a bomb, which trapped the carriage and some passengers in it forever like there was essentially a cave in and they were stuck and died and are entombed in the carriage.

But those kind of bombs weren't really falling on London for another few decades. Yeah, that's the thing. And this this legend was circulating as early as nineteen thirty, but there was there were no bombs that were going off in the eighteen sixties at in London like like that at that time. No, And and in fact, the Blitz didn't even happen by the time this urban legend first

started circulating. And so it got stronger after World War Two, I mean more because partly because people were using underground stations and and two tunnel lines as as a place to seek refuge during the Blitz. But that was just an urban legend in anyway. In eighteen sixty five, the London Pneumatic Dispatch Railway opened And this one is not meant to carry passengers, although I think someone wrote it the first time it opened. But the yeah, again, like

that would hurt Yeah, I think so too. The cars themselves, Uh, I was reading one description, it was said they were coffin sized. Yeah, so you they're not meant to carry people. But but freight and mail right that this is part of the mail system. Uh. And this comes directly from the pall Mall Gazette on October twelfth, eighteen sixty five. And you know it's in England. Okay, do it? Do it? Yeah? The driving power is at hlban and consists of two

twenty four horsepower steam engines. They set in motion a disc, the diameter of which is about twenty two ft. The immense circular fan revolves with great rapidity in an air chamber, creating an almost irresistible atmosphere power which but the use of valves, can be used either for blowing the trains through the tubes or literally sucking them back again. So there you go, good show, Thank you, thank you. Yeah

that was when I read that description. I was just so enchanted by the I was like, and atible atmosphere of power with such great rapidity, So I was, oh,

how British this this newspaper is. But yeah, very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Meanwhile, back on the telegraph, and in eighteen sixty eight, the UK government would pass the Telegraphs Act, which nationalized the telegraph industry and wrapped it into the Post Office, thus meaning that the g p O acquired like really quite a lot of pneumatic telegraph lines which various companies had

been privately building out over the past decade. Now this is also interesting because again it mirrors what happened with the subway system in London. The subways were built by private companies, so you had a bunch of different independent systems that were not connected together at first, until the government realized that this was a serious public good good and that you know, they wanted to help it out as much as possible and conform everything so that it

could be used as widely as possible. Exactly the same. Yeah. Meanwhile, across the Pond eight seventy an inventor by the name of Alfred ELI. Beach begins construction on a pneumatic subway in New York called the Beach Pneumatic Transit, obviously named after the inventor. The subway did not transport commuters to a magical New York beach sadly, but here's some interesting

and odd facts about that project. So first, Beach lied about what he was doing I read somewhere that, um that he had like personal disagreements with one of the powers that were at the time, someone by the aim of Boss Tweed. Oh well, here's the thing. Originally Boss Tweed backed Beach, but Boss Tweed fail fell from favor quite famously through corruption, and then after the fact Beach said he was one of the men who stood in

my way. He changed the story, and people said okay and went along with the story because they wanted to. They wanted this system to be put in place, but it ended up not being enough because there were other issues that would follow. But yeah, originally Beach and Buss Tweed were buddy buddy, and it was only after the fact when when Boss Tweeds going down Beaches like, well, I'm not going down with you like that guy was

always a pain in the butt. So so Beach really wanted to create this subway system, um, and you know, in order to do that, he would have to dig up part of a New York street. He knew that Tweed would not be excited about this thing. So he was like, well, what if I were building a nomadic male system. Yeah, you know what, we need a couple of couple pneumatic tubes. Want to send mail one way

one to bring mail back the other way. Clearly we can't have both going the same tube because if messages need to be sent in both directions or it's not gonna work. Yeah, dogs and cats. So what we need to do is have two tubes. And so they said, all right, that that proposal we can get behind you can you can build your your male pneumatic tubes. And then he says, all right, well, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna house this pair of tubes within a larger tube to protect them. So so I'm gonna need

to dig pretty big tunnel. It's gonna be it's gonna be pretty big. So Beach also came up with a tunneling shield, and we talked about those in the Subway episode two. Tunneling. Tunneling shields are essentially a tunneling tool that holds up the integrity of the tunnel while you're digging, so that people behind you can shore that up with brick or whatever they're using to seal it off. So he goes and he starts digging this tunnel. Everyone thinks

he's digging tunnels for humatic mail. Tubes. He's like, ha ha, I now have this wonderful device that I'm going to demonstrate to people, to show them how magical this is. You can ride in a carriage underground, thus avoiding all the dangerous traffic that's happening up on the surface level where you've got you know, horse drawn carriages going willy nilly all over the place and passing pedestrians everywhere. Exactly

back to the cats and dogs. So he ended up buildings a a track that was only three feet long or about yeah, and the tunnel was eight feet in diameter or two point four meters, and about twenty people could ride on the carriage at a single time. And he himself funded the construction almost entirely out of his own pocket, So hundreds of thousands of dollars that Beach

personally put forward to this because he really believed in it. Uh, if you wanted to take a ride on it once it opened, So he opens it and you actually had to go in through a department store. They had a an entrance to the station quote unquote station through their basement. The station itself was lit by gas lanterns, had a fountain with gold fish in it. And two statues of mercury, uh,

flanking the tunnel. Yeah, very understated, was Mr Beach. And so if you wanted to ride, you needed two bits, so two bits in order for you to ride, and that would give you a trip to the end of the line and back again. And all ticket uh, all tickets that were bought, all that money was given to charity. In fact, I think it was given to charity for children whose parents were whose fathers were soldiers who had who had died, So it was it was all going

to a charitable cause and it was yeah. Yeah, So it was supposed to be the birth of the subway system of New York, but it did not get much traction. Oh yeah, so uh boss the Boss Tweed corruption scandal happened and then Beach had to distance himself from Boss Tweed. Then uh he there was a stock market crash which ended up pulling a lot of funding away from any possibility of extending this outward. Also, there were people saying like could this actually be efficient? Um, we couldn't necessarily

run multiple trains on a single track. It would all be one train per track because you couldn't you couldn't control their movement between stations otherwise, like how would you how would you get train a to you know, unless you have like a really complex system of blowers. Um. So they started saying, well, this doesn't look like it's going to be very efficient. There's not there's no money to support it. And so also the rise of electricity

meant that ultimately it became moot. And again you and listened to how subways work to learn about the rest

of that story. So, while it was never really taken seriously as a means of transportation for passengers, Beach's original proposal to build those pneumatic mail tubes, which he totally wasn't serious about, did actually catch on, not as he originally imagined them, which were these like ten ft diameter tubes above city streets designed for both people in mail, which he was calling the US pneumatic dispatch, right, so

that never happened. As I'm sorry, clearly he was he was influenced at least in part by the London pneumatic dispatch, which was being successful as far as the mail goes, and um, so he would his his work would live on within that system, although I think he died before before it was actually built. Yeah, yeah, there's well, I mean, you know, progress is built upon a lot of hard work and sacrifice and not. In some cases it comes to us at the expense of ideas that seemed awesome,

but ultimately we're untenable. However, something is you know, salvageable from the idea, and I think that's the case with Beach. Now, we just got through eighteen seventy. But we still have some more history to get through. Plus we have to talk about how pneumatic tubes are being used today, so we're going to save that for episode number two. But trust me, the rest of the story is just as interesting and in some cases just as crazy, So you'll

need to tune in. Lauren, you'll be joining us for that one as well, right indeed, And where else can they see your work, Lauren? Well, these days I am working on other How Stuff Works shows such as brain Stuff, Forward Thinking, and what the Stuff? Yep, you can you can find all of those on how Stuff Works dot com, or you can go to varrain Stuff show dot com, or you can go to f be You Thinking dot com or the YouTube's go to the YouTube. You can just google Lauren Vogue o Bomb if you can spell

Lauren voge O bomb Um. I mean even if you can't, really you can. You can find me out of faith in you guys excellent. And of course if you want to drop align to me and have a suggestion for a future topic, whether it's you know what, an actual podcast topic, or someone I should have on as a guest host or someone I should have on as an interview, let me know. The email address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line

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